Lest we forget, all of this started because one man wanted to win an election: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-21148282
David Cameron wanted to appear tough and miscalculated badly, and now an entire country will pay the price (literally).
David Cameron wanted to appear tough and miscalculated badly, and now an entire country will pay the price (literally).
If David Cameron was wrong to give UK voters the option of leaving, are the leaders of Norway and Switzerland also wrong for failing to give their voters the option of joining? Seems like a double standard.
If they had come out with a clear outline of what was to be expected, then things would be different. There were all kinds of different narratives such as how it would be the 'easiest [deal] in human history'. Not to mention how poorly everything was formulated.
The referendum should've been a lot clearer in it's goals and limits. It's not a joke, it's not possible to be brash with such things because you can't redo it because then it becomes a matter of just redoing things until the party in power gets what they want. Cameron didn't take it seriously because he was so confident that it wouldn't come to pass.
In some ways, I am genuinely not surprised that Brexit happened when you have a large coalition of people that wanted hard brexit, people that thought it would be over and done with in one night, people that bought into the lies of british politicians about the EU because it's a convenient scapegoat.
If the options outlined were May's plan, no-deal or staying in the EU, things would've been very different.
Goddamn David Cameron.
I also think it’s crazy that the UK would even hold a referendum with a 50% threshold on such a key aspect of the country. Try make a change to the American constitution and you’re looking at 66% support in both houses and 66% of the states backing it. That is the right way to do it IMO for such fundamental changes.
Also a call to proportional voting would have lead to dozens of ukip and a few BNP members of parliament in the past, so it's not always a good thing even if it gives more seats to more deserving parties like Green.
Voting for Brexit provided none of that information, which is why it was wrong. It was a vote between keeping things as they were, or dunno we'll figure something out. The vote should have been whether they should negotiate a potential Brexit deal and then hold another vote to decide whether they leave.
That promise was then broken, probably because France, the Netherlands and Ireland all had referendums and all voted against the eu constitution which then became the Lisbon treaty. The prime minister was rightly worried that the UK would vote against it.
Ireland got a referendum on the Lisbon treaty, and so it passed. France and the Netherlands didn't get a referendum on that and I expect there is some resentment in those countries still because of it.
It would be like asking a vegetarian to prepare you a roast turkey Christmas dinner while telling them you’ve yet to decide if you’ll be staying for lunch, or not.
There was a referendum. Remain lost. Last year we had another General Election, with the Conservatives campaigning on a platform to get Brexit done, and they won decisively.
Labour + Lib Dem was about the same amount.
I think it's right for them to be naturally conservative and, following on from that, it is then quite sufficient for the threshold to be 50%, as that demonstrates a very significant desire for change across the population.
Mistake of Cameron was asking without the ability to ensure asking again when costs of leaving become apparent to the public.
In a direct democracy, where voters take on the role of legislators, voters are certainly expected to vote on the same subject more than once.
Of course, the UK isn't a direct democracy. And that is exactly the problem. People in the UK generally don't understand how direct democracies work, and forgivably so since there's no constitutional law regulating direct democracy in the UK, only subjective feelings.
Huge tangent, I started searching if joining the EU (European Economic Community) was a simple majority or a super majority and wound up here:
https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-09-05/debates/580...
it's fascinating to me to read how optimistic people were about brexit in 2016.
Hope it's ok if I link what I'm reading. Just trying to catch up as a 'merican.
Just once, but "Do you want to leave Europe in general, without knowing the deal?" and "Do you want to leave on these specific terms that will have this specific impact on the UK?" are different issues.
Thus it seems reasonable to put some brakes on some of the 'yesses'.
Arguably, that's why certain issues should be decided with a supermajority only. That way, you allow for some people to change their mind without affecting what the majority thinks.
A good democracy finds a compromise that gets a much larger majority vote.
The UK is going to become a Russian and American playground when Brexit occurs. It will be a paradise for oligarchs to play the populace even more. Oligarchs thrive from the chaos of these sorts of situations and especially financially.
I understand why Americans want to come to the UK. A lot of them come for the sole purpose of having access to better and guaranteed healthcare (you can have good insurance and still owe tens of thousands to millions if you have either cancer or a rare disease and both are statistically common—-also the third leading cause of death is believed to be medical errors according to Johns Hopkins and others—-you can go to the best institutions and still very easily die unnecessarily in the US as that kind of statistic cannot be evaded), but the lifespan of the UK population is going to lag hardcore compared to other countries on the European continent, especially ones in or aligned with the EU.
Getting UK citizenship can be hard too. They are not immigration friendly at all, unless you were an EU citizen (at least in the past). There are some really esoteric rules, and there are people who have been denied citizenship for having a misdemeanor moving traffic violation, with no arrest or criminal record, who paid the fine on time.
If you really want to have access to the UK, become a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the EU. By being an EU citizen, you can live/work/retire in over 30 European countries, including all of the EU countries. It is far easier to become an Irish citizen too. They are also very pro-EU. Not only that, citizens of the Republic of Ireland have rights to live/work/retire in the UK due to a common agreement.
Tourism is a totally different matter. You go to the “eastern” EU countries in that case.
As for the cancer patient survival, in the US, 42% of patients lose their life savings within 2 years and the amount was typically around $92,000. That alone screws American cancer patients over long term, and it can cause them to die.
EDIT forgot to add link for further information: https://www.truthorfiction.com/do-four-in-ten-cancer-patient...
You can cherry pick data, but your logic does not add up.
Spend some time on HealthData.org examining the US versus other developed countries.
We may have better cancer survival rates, but when you look at deaths attributed to amenable and non-amenable medical errors (believed to be the US #3 leading cause of death by multiple studies), the average American life expectancy, and anticipated life expectancies in the future (in addition to disability free years of life), it is 100% clear that we fail as a system.
A lot of these patients probably had missed or late cancer diagnoses too, due to the lack of preventative care and also just the lack of public health regulations in the US.
Pretty much every developed country has a better healthcare system than the US.
We do not have a normal system, and many like to think of it as normal, but it is far from that.
You can cherry pick data all day, but you are not seeing the big picture here, and you do not realize how easy it is to become a statistic.
I nearly died from medical errors in the US healthcare system myself, and from sepsis at age 23.
I am a dual US|EU citizen (culturally American) living in the EU, and I never plan on working in the US or living there long term.
If you have insurance, and 80-90%+ of Americans do (and probably more among cancer patients, as they are usually older so they often qualify for Medicare), it’s extremely rare to spend $92k in 2 year. Even in the plans with the highest out of pocket maximums, these are almost never more than $10k/year. That might drain people savings anyway, but a lot of people have very little savings.
I really don’t know where your data is from, but it doesn’t match the reality lived by most Americans. The US healthcare system has a lot of problems, so many that you don’t really need to make ones up.
While being an American expat is not as common due to worldwide liability on taxes, many of those who emigrate to developed countries and eventually become citizens do so for guaranteed access to healthcare and other benefits of a social welfare state that the US does not have.
The problem with Canada/Australia/New Zealand, where many Americans go, as we are more culturally aligned with them compared to other developed countries, is that they have medical inadmissability clauses in their immigration laws. You generally have to be pretty healthy to get a even get an approved work visa there, and stay relatively healthy to become a citizen. So, you really cannot effectively emigrate for healthcare to these countries. This is why you do not hear about Americans emigrating over healthcare as much.
Do you have any comparison for what cancer does to the finances of people in the UK? Because there is more to it than the cost of medical care. The cost of medical care is a lot less than that in the US: https://healthpayerintelligence.com/news/cancer-patients-pai...
“In a case study, a patient with lymphoma paid out-of-pocket healthcare costs from $6,446 in a large employer-sponsored health plan to $12,931 in a health plan on the individual health insurance market. These were all Affordable Care Act (ACA)-compliant plans.”
Note that your survey covers 2000-2012, mostly before the ACA went into effect.
The resource above says Americans spent $5.6 billion on out of pocket cancer care annually. There’s 2 million cancer cases annually, so you’re talking about $2,500 in out of pocket costs on average.
1. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... 2. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
While it cannot definitively be proven why somebody moves to X country and becomes a citizen, obviously it is for the benefits. In Europe, STEM workers typically get paid less, and often one needs an advanced degree (unless an internal company transfer occurs) due to the Bologna Process, which is a pan-European degree (education requirements) recognition agreement that applies to Americans too. So, one becomes a citizen for the values and the benefits.
It is clear that the article that you linked is talking about cost liability under contract, especially since it is coming from a "health payer organization". This includes the mentions of surprise billing, which are often classified as out-of-network, but under contract. Likewise, out-of-pocket costs in the article are being mentioned with respect to people insured and what was covered under contract.
You can get screwed financially as a cancer patient on Medicare. I personally have 2 rare immune mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system. One of them is very rare and I cannot go on a Medicare Advantage plan, as it would be an HMO with severe network restrictions. Once you go on a Medicare advantage plan, you effectively cannot go back to traditional Medicare (and also cannot get a Part B Medigap plan, because medical underwriting is allowed, even post ACA).
The problem is that traditional Medicare does not have out of pocket limits, and you can be subject to several tens of thousands of dollars in liability for prescription drugs once you hit the Medicare Part D prescription catastrophic coverage level, especially if you require an orphan drug.
For me, I require subcutaneous immunoglobulin and it is the only medication that has ever worked for me or put me in remission and I have tried about 10 different medications, plus combinations of them. It is literally my only option. Even intravenous immunoglobulin in the hospital (Medicare Part B), when optimized, was ineffective and never put me in remission.
I have Medicare due to disability and I am working now (I can keep Medicare for life technically if I pay the premiums every month). But, if I was living in the US, my yearly medical costs would be around $40,000-60,000/year on Medicare.
There are articles about this on the Kaiser Family Foundation website on Medicare Catastrophic Coverage liability. It happens to a lot of cancer patients and also people with rare diseases.
This is one of the reasons why I don’t live in the US, and the primary reason why I don’t live in the US is because of healthcare. Being able to work (with better protections--critical for me) and not having to worry about healthcare is worth living in Europe.
This pretty much never happens.
Remind me how the Lisbon treaty was passed when it was known as the EI constitution?
Most voters didn’t get a chance to vote on the most fundamental change of their countries’ being.
The voters who did get to vote rejected it. Margins of 10% (France) And 20% (Holland).
So what did the EU do?
Cancel the referendums in Portugal and the UK to avoid further embarrassment.
Then they pretended to have won Brezhnev level margins and passed the constitution anyway.
That is how the Lisbon treaty was passed, right?
Nope
However, the text was almost the same, and it was a dodge to remove the need for referendums in many EU countries.
Additionally, the Irish people voted twice on Lisbon, so it's not true that nobody in the EU got a vote.
Ultimately, we got lucky this past election, as in “unicorn levels”. What is going on in America is far from over and is going to ultimately be a generational struggle.
We did not get lucky.
How are American's votes equally weighted if 4 states (really 4 metro areas) get to decide who the president is every election?
No less a conservative jurist than Antonin Scalia repeatedly pointed out that he believed the US constitution was too hard to amend...amendments could be blocked by 2% of the population.
[https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/05/amending-the-con...]
To me, as an outside observer, it seems like the unseemly political shenanigans around appointments to the US Supreme Court are because the will of your Founders is too hard to override politically, and if the system of government was as great as it is made out to be, the philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justices would not be such a huge deal.
You’ve got it precisely backward. Liberals make the “philosophy and leanings of individual SCOTUS justice” a “huge deal” because they rely on the courts to legislate policies they can’t get through Congress.
You talk about the difficulty of amending the constitution, but how does that relate to the controversy around judicial appointments? When France and Germany legalized abortion, same sex marriage, etc., they didn’t amend the constitution. They just passed a law. But liberals didn’t have the votes in Congress to pass those laws. So they got it done through the courts. And then they create a controversy around judicial appointments because conservative jurists foreclose that strategy.
With respect to hot-button judicial issues in the US, the courts in Europe is a lot more like the American conservatives than the American liberals. In 2016, the European Court of Human Rights found that there was no fundamental right to same-sex marriage in the European Convention of Human Rights: https://eclj.org/marriage/the-echr-unanimously-confirms-the-.... That was the year after the United States Supreme Court found exactly the opposite.
Around the same time as Roe v. Wade several courts in Europe considered the same issue. None concludes there was an expansive right to abortion: https://repository.law.uic.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2...
> These decisions seem to reflect several possible solutions. At one end of the spectrum is the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court which held that the U.S. Constitution prohibits abortion legislation designed to protect the life of the unborn prior to viability. At the other end of the spectrum is the decision of the West German Constitutional Court which held that the State has an affirmative duty to protect the unborn life at all stages of pregnancy.
To this day Roe remains an aberration in the developed world. Under it, the government can’t ban abortion (even with exceptions for emergencies) prior to viability, at the end of the second trimester. Under Roe the abortion laws of nearly every European country would be unconstitutional. (Only the UK’s would pass muster. Most prohibit elective abortion after the first trimester.)
Difficulty of amending the constitution is irrelevant, because the controversy is caused by things that can’t get enough support nationwide for ordinary legislation.
Objection. When we get laws passed the way the founders intended, conservatives use the courts to strike them down; for instance, state and local bans on handguns.
Nobody's hands are clean.
You take the good with the bad! Conservatives hated Obergefell.
My point is simply that the court is politically polarized in both directions.
> There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.
Heller also shows that, even if the court is "politically polarized in both directions" that polarization runs strongly in one particular direction. Deciding that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms, a position amply supported by the text and history (see: https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/common.htm), requires a conservative majority plus buy-in from leading liberal academics.
Yet the decision that the Constitution protects a right to abortion, which concededly has no basis in the text or history of the document, survives despite decades of a conservative Supreme Court majority.
The only arguments against it that I can see all rely on some sort of fetishization of the Constitution which assume the document to be infallible.
It's not a "fetishization of the Constitution." Its observing the governing ground rules of society--which society is empowered to change pursuant to those same rules if it wishes.
Is it infallible? No. No one thinks it is. I can tell you a few areas I think it falls short.
Originally yes, the constitutional amendments only applied to the federal government, but that changed with the 14th amendment.
No, it didn't. The Court has, since the Fourteenth Amendment, found that rights equivalent to some protections in the Bill of Rights are imposed on the States through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, but each of these rights was incorporated by separate decisions; blanket incorporation is neither in the text nor in the case law. And the Second Amendment wasn't held to be incorporated against the states until 2 years after Heller, in a case directly leveraging Heller, so arguing incorporation to justify the obviousness of Heller is...bizarre.
You can articulate why you think Heller was properly decided and you can of course disagree with any or all of the justices on the court. The specific thing I am calling you on is the idea that the result is so straightforward that anyone who can read the text of 2A would reach your conclusion. That's an unsupportable argument.
There we go.
Regarding Roe v Wade (which I’ve read is widely seen as a bad decision) I agree that it’s unseemly. I also agree that in recent years too much social engineering has been routed through the Supreme Court.
I won’t dispute that most constitutional courts around the world are conservative or ideologically neutral, since they are aware that they can interpret the law as written, and not act as a pressure release valve against the dead hand of their “Founders” as they know that their populations can amend their constitutions if there is a pressing need.
The difficulty of amending the constitution is a theoretical problem. It takes a 2/3 majority of the Bundestag and the Bundesrat in Germany to amend the Basic Law. And for most of the issues where there is a disconnect between what the people want and the constitution, there wouldn’t be sufficient public support for an amendment even under the lower standard. Take gun control: https://www.slowboring.com/p/national-democrats-misguided-re...
Could you get a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate to repeal the second amendment? No way. Maybe you could get a 2/3 majority of both houses to overturn Citizens United.
But note also that 2/3 of Americans still oppose the Supreme Court decision banning school prayer. So it works both ways.
Obamacare is a bad example. The ACA case wasn’t a liberal versus conservative thing. It was simply a matter of the law as drafted failing to respect federalism. Courts in other countries aggressively enforce the structural protections of their constitutions, more so than the Supreme Court. Legislatures in those countries just deal with it. For example, Canada’s health system is largely administered by the provinces, with the federal government mainly setting standards and paying block grants to even out funding inequalities between the provinces. Has the ACA been modeled on Canada’s system (and in fact Medicaid is pretty similar) it would easily have passed muster in the Supreme Court.
The FDR era is the best example of where the Supreme Court really did strike down the will of the people to adhere to a conservative reading of the constitution. But the Supreme Court folded like a cheap suit when FDR threatened it, and now we have a nationwide minimum wage and executive administrative agencies that act like legislatures in issuing rules that have the force of law and like the judiciary in adjudicating regulatory violations before administrative judges. I don’t think say the German constitutional court would have allowed an entire new branch of government to be created without a constitutional amendment. While some conservatives might say the entire administrative state is unconstitutional, the public got its way ultimately. And you’re right I think it was the Supreme Court acting as a pressure release valve.
But overall I think it’s rare for conservatives on the Supreme Court to be out of step with the public on a legal issue where there is enough public consensus that an amendment would be possible under a lower 2/3 standard. Generally, conservatives are in the position of resisting change in areas where liberals might have a narrow majority or not even a majority.
There was no second referendum, but there were two general elections and in both the party pushing for Brexit decisively won.
Labour would have probably stopped Brexit and people could have voted for them, but they did not.
Except that Labour did not campaign on stopping Brexit; quite the opposite. Corbyn (who, depending on who you ask, is possibly a bigger Euroskeptic than David Cameron ever was) pointedly did not position Labour's election stance as being anti-Brexit. That was up to the LibDems who, in a FPTP system, were not going to win anyway largely because everyone still hates them over the college fees reversal.
Corbyn's Labour party always insisted that it would negotiate the "best possible Brexit," one that was more or less a "soft Brexit" but, just like the Tories, still a Brexit with all that entails. People were pleading with Corbyn to do exactly as you described and make the GE a mini-referendum on Brexit by Labour campaigning to reject Brexit...but Corbyn didn't.
Given how much support brexit had in traditionally labour seats in the north, I think, with the benefit of hindsight, labour could have avoided that embarrassing election result if they firmly committed to a soft brexit.
I feel like techsupporter lands closer to my memory of Corbyn’s position in the recent election, but also remember the flexibility in positions for individual Labour candidates you describe.
Probably that disunity and lack of leadership contributed somewhat to their loss. I strongly remember my impression going in to the election being that Labour supported Brexit because it was too afraid to lose the North (then lost it anyway because in the North they thought Labour was opposed to Brexit because they didn’t want to lose in the South)
Very few people decided to forget their political preferences just for 'probably'.
So fair enough. UK citizens probably earned what they got into.
The solution for the UK (and US) would be to adopt a proportional representation voting system. Not the single transferable vote of Australia like what was proposed years ago.
I’m talking about Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP), used in NZ and other countries. You have two votes, one for your local MP and one for a party. They don’t need to be for the same political group. Parliament is then made up of a combination of electorate MPs and party vote MPs (roughly two thirds electorate one third party).
So even if you are in a safe seat, at least one of your two votes still counts. It makes coalitions more likely, which means more viewpoints are considered. In NZ this has led to parties like the Greens having a bit of influence in govt, whereas under FPTP those green voters were completely disenfranchised.
More info https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/428085/election-2020-our...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/UK...
How much more are you going to ask?
I’d say that is strong evidence (Labour weakness aside) that the British public didn’t change their minds about Brexit.
if one is so quick to cast judgment on something which is not yet provably good/bad, will one also be just as quick to retract that judgment in the future if it ends up being of a different result?
According to the source below:
> To the best of our knowledge, the Liberal Democrats were the first of the three major UK parties, including Labour and the Conservatives, to campaign for a referendum on EU membership.
Only party which didn't push for an EU referendum in the 2010 run-up was Labour.
https://fullfact.org/europe/lib-dems-first-call-eu-referendu...