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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

As if Brexit wasn't enough damage already; there is always another opportunity for the UK to isolate itself even further if they are keen.

Europe - with 300 million people - can set new standards that others have to implement. The UK, or what will be left of it, not so much.

But the really disturbing thing about the UK is that there are many people in power to whom human rights are less important than "souvereignty". UK experts have lamented for a long time the backwards looking whining and longing for the UK's past glory (ironically, the same backward orietation is what made Russia go to war - glorifying and trying to restore USSR times).

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To Britain's ruling class, sovereignty means power; EU rules mean their hold on the nation is weakened. That's why the ultras got so much support from many people who came from political societies in Oxford, where Johnson, Rees-Mogg, etc., started their political careers, despite the case for Brexit being good for the UK as a whole having so many holes.

That may be true of certain political societies such as the local conservatives, I'm not sure.

But Oxford is an anti-Brexit, pro-European place. The academics (there are a large number) and the locals both dislike Brexit and voted against it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-3661540...

"Oxford" is being used to reference Oxford University in this context rather than Oxfordshire. I know, thoroughly confusing.

More specifically, the political societies were primarily OUCA (the student association for the Conservatives) and the Oxford Union, but also smaller debating societies like the Canning Club.

It's surprising to many Brits how many of the leading lights of Brexit belonged to these groups as students.

For clarity, most of Oxford University and Oxford the town are strongly anti-Brexit. It's also a very international place.

You might not think this if you heard about all the privately-educated and often wealthy Conservative politicians who came through Oxford University.

So I just wanted to clear up any impression that either Oxford town or Oxford University are like that. They aren't, and most people there are aghast and sad at Brexit.

In contrast, Oxfordshire the region outside Oxford, is more pro-Brexit and much more pro-Conservative than Oxford University and Oxford town. It might have something to do with who owns land.

The same contrast shows up with regard to Green policies, voting Labour, and proportional representation. Oxford town and members of Oxford University (which is a large number) typically vote Green, Lib Dem or Labour, and the Conservatives do poorly. It's politically a progressive place with an international outlook, compared with the surrounding county and the rest of the country.

That hardline Conservatives are not well regarded by Oxford University members is shown by its governing body voting as a protest to refuse Margaret Thatcher an honorary degree when she was prime minister: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/jan/30/thatcher-ho...

What human rights are you even implying here? Because this sounds like a wild accusation.

The ultras want to sever the UK's ties to European human-rights institutions, such as the ECHR.

But isn't that organization mostly used for political persecution, only under the guise of human rights' interests? Haven't they only gone after politically-unpopular-in-the-west entities, and never after the real egregious human rights violators?

No.

You may have a misunderstanding of what the ECHR is. A party can make an application to the ECHR against a member state of the Council of Europe (not the same as the EU) that that member has breached an article of the agreed European Convention on Human Rights. They don't "go after" individuals.

I see, thank you. I now see with which organization I had confused the ECHR.

I think they're referring to the move to repeal human rights laws in the UK

There is no move to do that. They are moving to make the UK Parliament sovereign.

The Parliament of the UK has an appalling record on human rights in Northern Ireland, where the ECHR has long been the authority to which cases are appealed. Withdrawing from the ECHR both de facto and de jure weakens the human rights protections for residents of Northern Ireland.

Perfidious Albion cannot be trusted when it comes to Northern Ireland, at least.

The UK Parliament ratified the Treaty? How is its sovereignty violated by something it itself agreed to?

It isn't, of course. It's just an article of faith now that anything Europe must be replaced. Anything that particularly gives something to do with Europe power is a threat to them.

During the referendum, it was a different story. Just the EU that was the problem. Nobody is talking about leaving the single market, no sirree!

They gave away powers, now they are taking them back.

This is a point you can make, but it's distinct from sovereignty being infringed. If Parliament is sovereign, it can decide to give away powers, no?

There is literally a move to do that. They are openly campaigning to repeal the Human Right Act and replace it with something that strips away most protections that are currently available to people whose human rights are violated by government.

The main changes being proposed are to give the government of the day more power and less judicial oversight, not parliament. Most changes are about removing people's ability to take the government to court. So it is the government of the day that becomes more sovereign, not parliament.

The changes don't affect parliament at all.

UK parliament is and always was ultimately sovereign on these issues. That was already true, with or without the Human Rights Act, and even when the UK was in the EU. (Otherwise there would have been no need for the UK to create its own Human Rights Act.)

In fact it was the UK parliament that put this judicial oversight of government in place in the first place by passing the Human Rights Act. Fashions change, and the current lot in power want to take the oversight away again.

>> There is literally a move to do that. They are openly campaigning to repeal the Human Right Act and replace it with something that strips away most protections that are currently available to people whose human rights are violated by government.

I don't recognise your characterisation, but that would be the ideal. That is not what is currently in process though.

>> The main changes being proposed are to give the government of the day more power and less judicial oversight,

Well, it gives the UK people more power. The elected government is a proxy for that.

>> UK parliament is and always was ultimately sovereign on these issues. That was already true, with or without the Human Rights Act, and even when the UK was in the EU. (Otherwise there would have been no need for the UK to create its own Human Rights Act.)

Yes, in as much as they decided, as sovereign, to give powers away. They are now as you say taking those powers back.

> There is no move to do that. They are moving to make the UK Parliament sovereign.

Oh I'm sorry, they're just replacing them with ones that can be enforced or ignored at will

For example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jun/14/european-cou...

UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights and often express their desire to circumvent it (see the linked Guardian article in another comment), or to remove its applicability from UK law altogether.

Supporters of human rights may find comfort in the fact that the UK is actually bound to the ECHR by various international agreements, including the Good Friday Agreement. This severely limits politicians' ability to scrap its applicability altogether, despite their repeated promises to the contrary. This excellent blog post from June summarizes all this well: https://davidallengreen.com/2022/06/oh-no-not-again-the-stor... .

Most recently the UK government introduced a "Bill of Rights". Despite its name, it changed little with respect to the applicability of the ECHR, but it does make it harder (again) for litigants to rely on the Convention in practice.

(Note that the ECHR, both the court and the convention, are completely separate institutions from the EU.)

> UK politicians, especially those on the right, were never big supporters of the European Convention on Human Rights

the European Convention on Human Rights was mostly drafted by a tory

the modern tory party's problem with the ECHR are its ability to create new law that is not subject to democratic oversight, namely around positive obligations

Do you live in London? It's just that this sounds like a very narrowminded take and one that I tend to hear from people living in London and who are culturally isolated from the rest of the UK.

The UK is neither a small country or a small market. While not as big as the EU, the UK is no where near as irrelevant as you're making out. I could also make the argument that many US sites refuse to comply with EU GDPR regulation so, no, others clearly don't "have to implement" EU standards.

> But the really disturbing thing about the UK is that there are many people in power to whom human rights are less important than "souvereignty".

You could just as easily wrap "human rights" in air quotes here. The idea that human rights are universally agreed upon is silly. Further, even when human rights are agreed on there are always conditions to them. Yeah, you have a right to free expression so long as you don't express the wrong things. Yeah, you have a right to liberty so long as you don't do the wrong things. If you're concerned about human rights then you should also be fundamentally concerned about sovereignty because without sovereignty who exactly is deciding on the rights that should be protected? "Rights" that are prescribed upon a population without its consent can be oppressive, and right or wrong, this is clearly how a lot of people in the UK feel towards rules created by lawmakers in the EU.

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On the this topic more broadly as a Brit I am much less concerned about websites tracking me without permission because there are things I can do to prevent that. If you're concerned about data protection I'd argue you should be more concerned about the perfectly legal real-world privacy violation that you have little to no ability to protect yourself from. For example, in the UK our communication devices (internet traffic, SMS, etc) are monitored, our streets are full of surveillance cameras, supermarket self-serve checkouts implement facial recognition without our consent, the police stalk the public on social media to ensure we're not saying anything offensive. Given all of this why should I care if tesco.com has placed a tracking cookie on their site without my consent? It seems so trivial to the point that it's almost a distraction from the real privacy issues that we face as a society. I'm not going to be locked in a cage because Tesco put a cookie on their website, but what the government decides to do with the data their collecting on me who knows. The only reasonable way I can protect myself from that is by not saying things my government doesn't like online and not attending protests or other real-world events that my government may not approve of.

It's a tired argument really.

The rules that were "imposed" on us by the EU were often written by us. We had a huge hand in setting those standards.

If we want to do business with the huge market next door, we will have to abide by those rules, whether we have a hand in setting them or not.

I guess we can turn inwards and become poorer, both economically and culturally. Or we increase the red tape our businesses have to deal with if we want to expand our markets.

I guess I don't disagree. I've switched between pro-EU and pro-Brexit positions over the last several years so I do get where you're coming from.

If you're optimising purely for economics then I don't think there's any question that remaining in the EU would have been the right decision. And yeah, I agree that sometimes compromise is just the cost of doing business.

The mistake you and a lot of remainers make though is to think Brexit is primarily about economics. Most of my family are on benefits and literally couldn't give a damn about what's in the best economic interests of the UK. I'm not saying that's right, but it is what it is. The problem people from my background have are more related to the social impacts of mass-migration and a lack of economic opportunities for low-skilled workers. From what I could understand that's why most of my family voted Brexit while most of my colleagues and university friends opposed it. I suspect the things that impact mine and your quality of life are different from that of my family.

I do think there's a place for an EU-like political entity that can set trade standards for the continent to encourage cross-border trade. The fundamental issue for me is that the EU as an organisation seems to be heading in the wrong direction. I'd personally prefer power to be more localised and closer to communities, where as the EU as an organisation seems to believe the trend should be in the opposite direction, towards ever more centralised power.

And they have a point.. If every nation state operates by different rules that's not good for multi-national corporations. But perhaps that's okay. Or at the very least it seems to me there's a trade off here. If there are things we can all agree on then it makes sense to have common rules, but enforcing agreement via a political union (or via any other means) generally isn't stable when opinions are too diverse. We see this even within the UK as political entity, but historically it's also clearly been true.

I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps what you see as economic costs have benefits which you might not appreciate as someone who largely agrees with the politics of the EU. It's like arguing to a Scot who dislikes the politics of Westminster that they'll be slightly worse off if they vote for Scottish independence. I think they get that, but they probably see the political opportunities of an independent Scotland as more important even if it comes with an economic cost.

Thanks for your considered reply. It's good for us to understand the different points of view in this.

I am indeed a remainer, although I was not motivated primarily by the economics. I just felt European, and mostly glad to be part of it. I could see problems with it, but nothing is perfect. I believed we would all likely be poorer out of it.

I get the immigration issue was important to many people, although immigration is now higher than it was before Brexit. Just not from the EU.

Everyone had different reasons and motivations at the end of the day, rightly or wrongly as it may turn out. I am glad we can have this conversation though, it's still rare I find.

Edit: tried to find source for my claim migration is higher, as I remember seeing it, but can't find it. ONS says from 2021 it was down a little bit overall.

> If every nation state operates by different rules that's not good for multi-national corporations.

Multi national corporations don’t really care whether the rules are homogenous or not, they’re big enough to do whatever they need to to sell their goods and services in whichever markets they want. The single market was actually more of a benefit for smaller companies, allowing them to sell to 500m people without having to worry about customs declarations, country specific safety certifications etc. There are many many examples of small producers having to stop selling to EU customers after Brexit because of the added cost and bureaucracy.

> The idea that human rights are universally agreed upon is silly.

True. But it's not silly to think that the UK, as a signatory to the EHCR did agree on what human rights are with 46 other countries.

> "Rights" that are prescribed upon a population without its consent can be oppressive

Hm, either those air quotes are doing a lot of work, or we have different understandings of 'oppressive'. The only explanation I can think of for your statement here is that there are fairly limited circumstances in which the rights of one individual result in restrictions on the behaviour of another - for example inciting hatred, threatening violence, spreading untruths. I certainly wouldn't describe any of those restrictions as oppressive. Whether you want to call the limitations 'wrong' or not is ultimately a judgement decision, but for what it's worth, I don't think any of these are wrong.

> this is clearly how a lot of people in the UK feel towards rules created by lawmakers in the EU.

This is also true. But unfortunately displays the ignorance of many people in the UK, as the ECHR is not tied to the EU, so being cross with the EU about "human rights" is, although undeniably a contributing factor to the referendum result, basically a mistake. In fact the recent Rwanda flights were blocked by the ECHR more than two years after the UK left the EU.

> I am much less concerned about websites tracking me without permission because there are things I can do to prevent that

As an HN reader, you're likely more tech-savvy than most. Others may not be as easily able to prevent tracking. Additionally, some of the things you may want to do to prevent tracking may break core functionality. For example, I discovered recently that the Parliament TV website doesn't work if you don't download jQuery from a Google CDN. It seems to me to be an unacceptable requirement that in order to access materials which are produced with tax-payer money and are documentary evidence of our democratic processes, I have to share information with third party companies.

> If you're concerned about data protection I'd argue you should be more concerned about [...]

This type of argument is not helpful. I am indeed concerned about the things that you mentioned, but that doesn't mean that I cannot ALSO be concerned about websites tracking me.

> the police stalk the public on social media to ensure we're not saying anything offensive

Is there something specific you're thinking of here? I'm fairly confident that it is perfectly legal to say things which are offensive on social media. Here's Lancashire police's take: https://www.lancashire.police.uk/faqs/online-safety/someone-.... The CPS also has published guidance on this topic, although it's a bit heavier: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/social-media-guideline...

> Given all of this why should I care if tesco.com has placed a tracking cookie on their site without my consent?

I'll refer you to the excellent explanation at https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters, but I would say that I'm a bit concerned that perhaps you don't really understand what the risk is here (or the technology at play).

Tracking cookies are placed on YOUR computer, not on a site. If you visit tesco.com, log in and do your online shopping, then Tesco might have a cookie set on your computer which contains your user ID. Now, you've finished your shopping, and you go to your local sex shop's website. Now, assuming there's a network request from the sex shop's site towards Tesco.com, they'll be able to see that user kypro accessed https://ilikebigbutts.com. Now, Tesco is not really a big threat here because there's no reason for Tesco to work with the sex shop, but companies like Google or Facebook encourage webmasters to include like buttons or tracking code for analytics etc. in order to gather this data and sell access to you to advertisers.

> not attending protests or other real-world events that my government may not approve of.

This for certain is especially worrying given the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act. But I think this is called the fallacy of relative privation in formal terms - just because one thing is bad, and another relatively less bad, does not mean that the second thing is not also bad.

> Europe - with 300 million people - can set new standards that others have to implement.

the EU's share of world GDP is in terminal decline (down from 30% in the 80s to about 15% today)

its ability to export its legislation will be gone by 2050 (if not sooner)

You seem to be getting a lot of downvoting, which is unfortunate. So clearly your use of the word 'terminal' is nonsense. You have no way of knowing that, any more than you know that China's will continue to grow or any other bit of economic crystal ball gazing, but...

I am interested in your assertion about the actual numbers 1980s vs today. Can you provide a reference for that please? The direction of travel in those 40 years seems plausible to me. After all, China has definitely become a much bigger slice of the world's productivity pie than it was then so others must have a smaller ratio than they did. But the absolute numbers are kinda interesting.

> which is unfortunate

it is simply a.completely non sensical post.

in the 80s Europe was formed by just 12 countries, EU did not even exist, euro did not exist, Germany was two countries, there was a wall in Berlin dividing the city in east and west Berlin, USSR was a global power and we did not calculate in the global GDP more than half of the World.

That's why the downvotes.

Only if that trend continues for that long.

I don't think that will be the case. Most of the decline is not absolute but relative, due to China growing. But they're finding themselves seeing reduced growth now too.

So does US and other developed nations.

US GDP was %40 of the entire worlds economy, it dropped to %30 by the 1985 and today its below %24.

That's simply a function of population and development and in world where every nation reaches property it would be proportional to the population.

If China and India happens to transform itself into prosperous countries, US and EU and everybody else will follow and for the better because this is not going to happen in their current state of affairs.

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