The goal was never in doubt really, and it was never the 'good of the country', or its people.
Did the UK have the legal right to alter trading regulations? For example, could the UK decide to import chlorine washed chicken from US while in the EU?
Did the UK have a legal right to discriminate against labours from the EU who applied for jobs in the UK?
Please feel free to add context to my questions, because I've had enough of these conversations to know you'll have reasons why although we couldn't control our borders, trade and labour in many circumstances that it doesn't matter. I'll probably agree with you in most cases.
But unless the EU literally does nothing and serves no purpose, obviously there are things that we can do now we are out of the EU which we could not do while in the EU. Please decide whether the EU forces us to do things but those things we are forced to do are good, or the EU does nothing at all, but we should still stay in it. You can't have it both ways.
I'll also note, we've massively reduced the number of migrants coming from Eastern Europe, this is something that we literally could not legally do while in the EU.
What did "less Eastern Europeans" (but repalced now with Asian and African migrants) improve for the UK?
At best it is irrelevant (what should we care about people's ethnicity or 'race'), at worst it is a negative, cue social issues all over Europe.
It is actually tragic that voters are the butt of the jokes here when, really this is quite serious.
Of course the government has to want to, which is the point and effectively the scam that has been going on for years.
I have no strong opinion on Brexit, but one of the reasons I was opposed to it was because it allowed us to import cheap labour into the NHS. This is something we are now struggling to do and will likely mean we will need to pay NHS workers more to attract talent from elsewhere in the world.
Yes. As long as they're not a burden on the state*. The "4 freedoms".
> Did the UK have the legal right to alter trading regulations? For example, could the UK decide to import chlorine washed chicken from US while in the EU?
No. Trade is an EU power (competence).
> Did the UK have a legal right to discriminate against labours from the EU who applied for jobs in the UK?
No
> I'll also note, we've massively reduced the number of migrants coming from Eastern Europe, this is something that we literally could not legally do while in the EU.
While massively increasing "legal immigration" from outside the EU by instituting a bunch of incompetent policies. i.e. "point based" but with no caps on numbers.
Basically we reclaimed a bunch of political powers (the non EU immigration not being one of those), and now only have ourselves to blame for how we exercise those powers.
* There are 90 day rules about being present and not able to support oneself. However for political reasons, the UK was never able to use those. We don't have population registers, so can not track where folks are. The prior Labour "ID card" scheme which would have allowed such was scrapped after every other party promised to scrap it in the next GE, and a different party got in.
100% agree. I'm not in favour of reducing migration, but assuming the UK public wanted to reduce migration to say ~100,000 as the Tories promised, we would have struggled to do this while in the EU.
I think a lot of people wrongly thought that our membership in the EU was the reason net migration was so high, in reality is was simply that our politicians wanted it to be high and therefore found other ways to keep it high after we left the EU.
Yes but also had the right to deny that to those who couldn't take care for themselves(can't be burden to the society). So can't stop them from coming but doesn't have to keep the freeloaders. UK choose not to pursue that but could have.
> Did the UK have the legal right to alter trading regulations? For example, could the UK decide to import chlorine washed chicken from US while in the EU?
Yes, just different legislative path. UK was full EU member since the beginning and they created those trade deals within EU and they can change them within EU. Obviously they will need to convince others about the benefits of the chlorinated chicken so they can pass that change but they also need to do the same for the electorate in the UK ehen outside of EU.
> Did the UK have a legal right to discriminate against labours from the EU who applied for jobs in the UK?
No. The idea is that meritocracy prevails, arbitrary discrimination is not OK. EU people apply for jobs freely, employers are free to chose the person who would like to work with and they can chose to work with a Brit or EU citizen if the like to. Why do you want the UK government discriminate against people and force employers to hire those they don't want to? What's wrong with meritocracy?
> EU literally does nothing and serves no purpose
EU's primary purpose is the create peace in Europe by making countries inter-depended and give common access to the resources. If you want to operate a car factory in Berlin, you don't have to conquer Berlin - you can just go there and buy or start one.
Beside this primary purpose, EU has many many more functions. It sucks or excels in some and does OK in others.
The vast majority were not economic burdens though? So no we couldn't have pursed that apart from in the very small minority of cases where that was the case. We'd then need to go through a costly and timely legal process of proving it and deporting them.
> Yes, just different legislative path. UK was full EU member since the beginning and they created those trade deals within EU and they can change them within EU. Obviously they will need to convince others about the benefits of the chlorinated chicken so they can pass that change but they also need to do the same for the electorate in the UK ehen outside of EU.
I don't disagree with this, but it's also not wrong to say the the EU removed the ability from UK law makers to make trade deals independently of the EU. This meant everything the UK wanted to do we had to do with the approval of other EU nation states which often had different economies, cultures and economic goals.
The argument that we would have more control to make our own trade deals outside of the EU is true, although a good argument can be made that those trade deals will not be as favourable if we're acting independently of the worlds largest trading block. Neither black or white is helpful in my opinion.
> No. The idea is that meritocracy prevails, arbitrary discrimination is not OK. EU people apply for jobs freely, employers free chose the person who would like to work with and they can chose to work with a Brit or EU citizen if the like to. Why do you want the UK government discriminate against people?
I don't personally, no. But a lot of people in the UK didn't want UK jobs to be on offer to labourers from low-wage Eastern European countries.
I take the highly controversial view that the UK government should suppress working class wages via mass migration and ensure the UK public are educated enough to not need to compete with foreign low-skill labourers. I want agricultural workers and NHS staff to be under paid if it means cheaper food and health care for natives, but obviously if you're a labourer working in those sectors you might not view this arrangement so favourably. People have also taken moral disagreement with me about whether it's right to engineer a migrant labour underclass at the benefit of natives, but if you don't discriminate against people from low-wage economies then this is almost inevitably the result.
I don't know why you fantasise about discriminating against productive law abading EU citizens. I guess you personally are better of out of EU and EU is better of by not having you. It's very creepy that you are annoyed that you can't arbitrarily discriminate against EU citizens.
Also, there's no such thing as a low-wage Eastern Europeans, they still rent in UK and shop in UK and are employed within the UK labour laws. If you are against low wages you should increase the minimum wage, if you can't compete against Eastern Europeans it's because you don't provide enough value to the employer to choose you. If British are outcompeted in the labour market, maybe British should re-evaluate their education system. British employers don't hire Bulgarian butchers when they need JavaScript developers just because it's cheaper to hire Bulgarian butchers. It simply means that Brits don't have the skills for the money they ask, the Eastern European ones have it and that's why they get the job at free market rate.
Also, nothing sudden happened in 2016 about Eastern Europeans, Poland joined 12 years before that and Bulgaria and Romania 9 years.
Expanding the talent pool is better for consumers of that pool, but worse for providers - that is, a UK worker earning some salary may find that his salary stagnates or reduces because of more workers with similar qualifications arrived from lower-paid Eastern Europe. So it a bit depends on definition. Shutting down schools and banning kids will lead to the same - but over a much longer time period which may be enough to more comfortably adapt; of course these two measures have severe unintended consequences.
Yes, Brexit's 2016 isn't a year when a country from Eastern Europe joined EU - but could be a year when the consequences of such joining, accumulating over time, reached the level which allowed Brexiters to prevail.
Why? Because you are compensated with money but you can’t consume money - you can benefit by exchanging it for a product or service and the more people are working the cheaper these are.
For example, if a Polish person pushed your salary down by immigrating to UK, another Polish person who is a butcher pushes your cost of eating meat down too. Another one pushes down your health costs or transport costs. When it’s a free market, it automatically balances the economy. When you have too much money but too little people who create the product and services, it causes inflation.
What creates prosperity in a society are working people, not numbers in the bank account going up.
It is drastically harder for people from the EU to immigrate to the USA than to the UK, even post Brexit.
The nature of migration is such that the foreign migrants become the national public (at least part of). Both groups are inside your borders now, so how would you make sure that the "low-skill" people does not aquire skill?
IOW, you want one arbitrary part of the people present within the state borders to be educated, and another arbitrary part to be low-skill, and this regimen should be upheld by what means?
(only asking because I fail to see how this could be done IRL without resorting to apartheid style rule)
Until I told them they were voting for literally preventing their daughter and me the life we've been living. Their grandkids, everything wouldn't have been possible without her being allowed to work there, and me being able to work here...
They hadn't realized that of course, because you know, as far as immigration goes, they were just fine with the lovely polish lady at the shop, and me of course, what they didn't want is 'them' (not entirely clear who that is).
Sure it doesn't prevent it altogether, but it creates many barriers and increases cost and uncertainty.
I went to the UK long before Brexit and currently hold settled status but had all that not been the case I'd probably be in Spain, or the Netherlands, or perhaps Germany.
Going to the UK would simply not be worth the hassle when I have so many other much more accessible options, and in places where I wouldn't feel like I'm being done a favour for being allowed to live there, work there, pay my taxes and do my shopping there, helping British organisations modernise themselves and become more competitive, helping grow the GDP...
Harder yes, but buserror said it was voting for "literally preventing their daughter and me the life we've been living". That statement is "literally" not true, unless buserror could not have met those requirements at any point in the past decades. Having requirements is not the same thing as absolute prevention.
Maybe not legally, but literality includes the practical aspects of life as well.
The way he managed to justify the hatred towards a generic "them" while accepting people like me is a simple trick (I don't know if he came to this conclusion all by himself or with the help of the right wing intellectual class that concoct new tricks every day in the newspapers he reads):
He says that these dirty immigrants should go away because there are many criminals. Sure, he says, there are fine people like you, but they are an exception.
I object that there are plenty of Italian criminals, and I even try to find data to debunk his claims that more than half of Italian jails are filled up with immigrants (he claims he got those facts from the aforementioned newspapers).
But then he just drops his "get out of jail card" and says "ok, sure, we also have plenty of criminals, thieves, rapists, etc; but they are OUR criminals, OUR thieves, OUR rapists; we have to keep them, they are OUR people; I don't want those OTHER people coming here and doing those bad things, we already have our own to deal with".
It's all about the absolute certainty that most of the immigrants are here with the explicit intent of doing harm. Normal laws shouldn't apply to them, he says. If you're an immigrant and it looks like you may have done something bad, immediate deportation; the current laws are too lax, he says. they are good for italians, of course, because God forbid his daughter gets arrested just because she superficially looks like somebody who committed a crime, but it's ok for THEM to be treated like that ...
... Because ....
because he doesn't know them. He never met THEM. Every time he met an immigrant that immigrant became a PERSON and once that became a person it no longer became one of THEM.
That's why he's perfectly fine with the Albanian housekeeper, the Croatian son in law, the Turkish mechanic, ....
They all are fine people who are not the dirty criminals the newspapers he reads keep talking about
Typically, an official criminal record is a mandatory part of the application.
So all inefficient criminals, who have been caught at least once, will be excluded from the immigrants :-)
No EU country has control over immigration or trade. EU citizens can move anywhere they want in europe, EU companies can trade anywhere they want in europe. That's the point.
If I were the only person of a certain view, and being told something so absurd by a group of people, in earnest, my face would drop too.
EU countries have lots of control over immigration. Each gets to decide its immigration levels from outside the EU (to be technical, outside the EEA+Switzerland), and which of those immigrants it wants under what terms
The EU only controls intra-EU immigration and some aspects of asylum/refugee policy. Rest-of-world immigration remains a national competency in which the EU has very little say. Same is true for nationality and citizenship
Also, Denmark and Ireland have opt-outs from long-term residence, and the UK did too prior to Brexit, so it does not apply to them.
What happened in 2015 was Sweden’s own decision, not something forced on Sweden by the EU. If Sweden had chosen to take a hardline anti-refugee position - as some other member states did - the EU would have been powerless to prevent it. In fact, I think your response is a classic example of the phenomenon in which people wrongly blame the EU for the free choices of its member state governments. Sweden chose to welcome refugees even when EU law granted it the legal right to expel them instead
Are you sure he wasn’t just saying what you wanted to hear in order to end the discussion? Most people don’t want to talk politics at work if they’re the single only person who holds a view, and if everyone’s angry that brexit happened and is badgering him to say why he thinks it was a good idea, perhaps he found that the path of least resistance was to say basically “hmm, guess you’re right”.
(Note, I’m not pro-brexit, this is just my experience when talking politics at work. Those who hold minority views don’t often want to litigate them at length with coworkers, and you the ones who do… you probably don’t want to work with.)
The Russian infowar on the US was no less drastic and no less successful, and that’s just the most recent iteration on it, it’s been openly going on for at least 15 years here too (since the 2008 election at least).
There’s a reason the resolution was non-binding. Maybe an act this big should have required 2/3 majority.
Good enough for something g as inconsequential as pressing alt-f4, but not for ripping away the birthright and citizenship of tens of millions of people.
And while we’re at it, make it illegal for politicians to spread baseless misinformation? If you say something you have to back it up.
The Tories knew exactly what they were doing, and how they were doing it, and could have backed out at almost any time. Knowing that they were deliberately misleading people, they arguably should have backed out instead of going ahead with their colossally atrocious decision.
In short: referendum and people’s will kind of requires an informed populace and an informed decision, the Brexit vote was neither of those things. Maybe the only upside was demonstrating to everyone else what a godawful decision it is to self-immolate by leaving the EU is.
1: "Thank you for your interest we will take the result under advisement and form a committee to study the matter" and then shit can it. If "the people" cared enough they'd make it an election issue.
2. "We have come up with three proposals for how to respond. There will be another referendum, this time binding, with ranked choice (or whatever) to decide which specific path to take, with status quo as option 4. At least 60% of at least a 60% turnout is necessary to pick one, otherwise we stick with the status quo." Then run that.
Or many other choices. But make no mistake there were LOTS of options beyond the extreme one picked.
There is precedent for this - Australia uses effectively the same criteria for constitutional amendments (both a majority nationally and a majority in the majority of states). Although, unlike Australia, the UK doesn't have a written constitution, and isn't formally a federation (although devolution has given it quasifederal features), the UK definitely needs something like that given the extreme lopsidedness of its population (one of its four members, England, being roughly 80% of the total
Then after being elected large numbers of MPs announced that in fact they weren't going to let the UK leave, and wanted to impose a second "People's Vote". These MPs had done exactly what some people on this thread are asking for: they agreed to a referendum and then decided they didn't like the result so they wouldn't obey it.
What happened next seems to have been largely memory holed: Johnson kicked the rebels out of the Conservative party (Labour did not), sending his party from having a majority to deep minority. Parliament then went entirely rogue and attempted to take over the Brexit process from the government in order to directly kill it. Johnson asked for a new election to take the mess back to the people, and the rogue MPs denied that too. They knew full well they had directly stabbed the electorate in the back and they'd all lose their jobs at the next GE as a result, so they just ... refused to hold a GE.
This was by far the biggest constitutional crisis the UK has had in my lifetime. Representative democracy is built on the basic assumption that if politicians say they believe in X, campaign on X and then get voted in because of X, that they will actually vote for X in Parliament. If large numbers of MPs claim they will support something and are just baldly lying, democracy dies. And that's what happened.
The crisis was ended only by a stroke of luck: the head of the Liberal Democrats became so delusional she began to drink the rebel MPs own kool-aid, and think that the population actually supported their desire for a second People's Vote. After blocking a new election for a long period, she decided to vote with Johnson's remaining loyal MPs to trigger one, at which point all the rebels including her were wiped out. Every single one lost their seats.
So, what you ask for actually happened. It didn't work because the British people voted the same way and for the same things they did in the referendum.
If the MPs actually wanted to be successful in thwarting it, they should have blocked the sending of the Article 50 notification. i.e. either placed conditions on the notification Act, or denied it passing. My view is that they were too craven (or stupid) at the time to show their true convictions.
Anyway, the faffing about was a different Parliament, the withdrawal was sent 29th March 2017, then we had a GE and May lost her majority.
I'd not view any of those "rogue parliament" events as a constitutional crisis, they're representatives, not delegates. As has been pointed out before, we have no legitimate expectations from anything an MP says to be elected. Our only recourse is to subsequently vote them out.
A constitutional crisis would only really have happened if the Scottish MPs (possibly with MSPs) had acted to thwart things - i.e. end the Union; but the then SNP folks were (and still are) too happy in their gravy.
As to an earlier 2019 GE, with the FTPA they were not obliged to do so. Yes their faffing about was annoying, and I take the view that folks were just sick of them dithering, hence the 2019 GE result.
However, one should not really speak of the UK being a democracy.
We (well strictly England, as the Scottish rules are generally ignored) are an absolute monarchy where parliament has wrested away most of the power, and handed it to the cabinet, which really means the PM. (The Scottish monarchy was never absolute.)
As has been observed in the past, the UK is essentially an elected dictatorship, which depends upon those in power being "good guys". Recent events have shown how fragile that is, yet still it has not been (and probably will not be) reformed.
What happened was extraordinary and had not been seen before. Calling it mere "faffing around" suggests you either don't remember those events fully, or perhaps, wished the conspirators had succeeded. Again - all the MPs who engaged in that so-called faffing around were evicted from their seats at the next election and there were IIRC more than 50 of them. The Lib Dems were the ringleaders, and voters reduced them to a rump. In particular their leader was booted from Parliament. The citizens showed exactly what they thought of this "faffing around" and it wasn't pretty for those who did it.
> the UK is essentially an elected dictatorship
That's a contradiction, isn't it?
If you really want to lawyer things, the UK isn't essentially anything at all. There is not really a written constitution, the country just makes it up as it goes along. That means the constitution is whatever people think it should be. And pretty clearly, from the brutal destruction the Lib Dems caught in the last GE, the people think that MPs should meet basic standards like not baldly lying about their intentions, not attempting to overthrow their own government, not switching to parties with polar opposite key policies and not refusing to hold elections.
Any system of government is defined by what people expect to happen, what people actually do, and ultimately what the army does. A democracy lives only as long as whoever wins doesn't immediately take over the secret police and execute all their opponents. If a UK political party were to try and do that, it would be right and proper for people to be outraged and enact extreme severe repercussions on those who were doing it. The fact that technically tradition says Parliament could vote for such thing really just doesn't matter at all, and British history is full of de facto changes to the role and powers of Parliament.
Indeed, EU membership was exactly that. Lawyers will tell you that under the "unwritten constitution" Parliament may not bind itself, i.e. one party can't pass a law that forbids the next party from passing a different law. Yet EU membership did exactly that for decades.
In Scotland, the people are sovereign, can (and have) sacked their monarch.
In England, the monarch was sovereign, now it is "the crown in Parliament" which is sovereign after parliament executed a king, and took the power.
Those two positions can not be accommodated, so they're forgotten about, and the establishment acts as if the constitution is that of England - i.e. Scotland wass annexed.
If the desire is to do nothing or do something, and the vote is roughly equal, then generally you should just do nothing because of the increased cost of doing something. If 66%+ or 75%+ of people want to do something, then go for it.
er what? david cameron immediately quit and then theresa may immediately went full-hard-brexit without bothering to try to figure out actual goals or compromise or get anyone on board.
Brexit is exactly what the high-class brits wanted. Look at where the campaign funding came from. The people who lost out were working class.
> Weigh brexit vote by tax paid per year, lifetime tax paid, or years having to live with the consequences, by educational attainment, and you get a remain landslide.
EU control over foreign and military policy has clear limitations. Most decisions in that area are done by unanimity (so Germany has no more power to block them than any other member state), and for those done by a qualified majority, while Germany has the largest vote (having the largest population, 19%, it was smaller pre-Brexit), it can be outvoted (65% of population is the threshold). Generally it involves the EU adopting a consensus position on certain issues, but leaving member states free to adopt their own policies in areas for which no consensus position was been adopted, and (very often) to go beyond the consensus in ways compatible with it.
It is pretty difficult to argue that in the case of Ukraine, UK's autonomy has come in very handy indeed and was one of the promised benefits of Brexit. The EU has been consistent in it's messaging, but it's deeds have not always lived up to when and what they've said they'll deliver.
Hungary is blocking aid out of the EU budget. It has zero power to block other EU countries from giving aid out of their own budgets. Big member state national budgets are each several times larger than the EU budget.
> Meanwhile, the UK delivers aid how and whenever they like (including many firsts like western battle tanks, cruise missiles, etc.).
Which it could still do in the EU. Many EU member states provide military and other aid to Ukraine outside of the EU framework, and the EU has done nothing to stop them
> The UK would be under a lot of pressure not to act unilaterally,
Not true. EU member states have been giving independent aid to Ukraine - for example Poland - and the EU has not done anything to stop them. In fact, the biggest obstacle to Polish military aid has not been the EU, it has been Germany and the US - Poland buys military equipment from both, and the contracts said they couldn’t re-export it to a third country without permission, and both Germany and the US were dragging their feet in giving Poland that permission. The EU had no real input into that dispute, since it was outside of its competence - its only real role was to provide another forum in which Poland could exert political and diplomatic pressure on Germany (and more indirectly the US), but it had no power to make any of those countries do anything
This is mostly making my point. Money that the UK would send to the EU would no longer be under their control and unavailable to send to Ukraine -- which is being held up by intransigent member states like Orban/Hungary. All of the UK's funds are presently within the UK's discretion to send to Ukraine. If they were a member of the EU, less funds would be available to even consider sending to Ukraine. It is quite a lot harder fiscally speaking.
> Not true. EU member states have been giving independent aid to Ukraine - for example Poland
With all due respect to Poland and it's people (whom I admire), you can't really compare the political gravity and the pressures of the UK vs. Poland. The UK was one of the leaders in within the western EU and had to act in coordination with the rest of the EU. Also, Poland is in a very different political situation (i.e., Eastern Europe, border state, former Soviet Block, etc.). If London would have spent the same amount of it's GDP as Poland, there would have been a lot of concerns and raised eyebrows in Brussels for sure. If the UK were in the EU, they would be feeling the pressure not to get too far out in front of the slow-footed Germans. Poland doesn't exert the same pressures on Germany as the UK would while in the EU (again nothing but respect to Polish folks).
Re-export agreements are standard in all arms agreements, so that's a different matter (which I agree with you about).
Government budgeting is not a zero-sum game. The UK as an EU member could still have given the exact same amount as they have given outside of it. They could have done that either by cutting spending in other areas, raising taxes or borrowing more. Whether or not they would have is a very hypothetical/speculative counterfactual which nobody can know either way with any great confidence.
> The UK was one of the leaders in within the western EU and had to act in coordination with the rest of the EU
There is no hard requirement to "act in coordination with the rest of the EU". In the area of foreign policy, the EU has no enforcement mechanism. In other policy areas, if a member state disobeys EU rules, the Commission can take them to the European Court of Justice; however, foreign policy has been explicitly excluded from the Court's jurisdiction. So if the UK really wants to do their own thing on foreign policy, there is nothing the EU (or its other members) can do to stop them.