Brits would quite like their private messages to stay private
theregister.com
theregister.com
Of course, this is only for national security since humans are corruptible, and these people have vastly most control over a nation's resources, thus, 24/7 monitoring of their private lives, by the public, is super important... for national security ... or else how we can be sure they have not been compromised by a foreign power.. or are not being blackmailed to act against the nation?
All for national security... nothing else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...
(I thought I heard fedex vehicles actually do this)
People that are elected by the public and hold the power to define every aspect of our lives, should be held to the absolute highest level of scrutiny possible. Every aspect and every single moment of their lives should be transparent and recorded while they hold office, no exceptions whatsoever.
I will concede that having it broadcasted may be a tad hard to do, but there should be a record of what happened during their time - in fact there should be a way to answer the question "what was minister X doing at 2026-08-29 20:13:14 UTC?"
And for the argument that says "oh then nobody would want to do it", I think that's in favour of this approach. Look around at what we're dealing with, and which people want to win elections and the fervour with which they go about it.
We should be trying to make this kind of "job" as unappealing as possible. It should be a chore, not something to go after.
It’s naive to think politically motivated surveillance can’t happen in the UK and elsewhere. Or to assume that only the “right people” will be the ones able to break encryption.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
but message E2EE is generally not designed to solve that. Other layers of the stack would probably have to get involved.
You also have a president who has just said he will "report" a journalist to the FCC for "rebuke or punishment".
I regret to inform people that fear over people cracking your encryption is quite niche, at this point; you have a looming fascist regime and should be more afraid of the $5 wrench.
Ref for anyone looking: https://xkcd.com/538/
Destruction of potential evidence of a crime is a crime. Obviously here there is nuance and the courts can determine if this is the right interpretation or not. If he had compromising information and he reasonable suspicion he’d be asked to unlock his phone he should have “wiped” it way before he got to the border.
They'd have to prove there was evidence.
It's quite unadvisable to destroy data in front of any sort of law enforcement. Last ditch effort? Sure, you better your odds but it's not ideal. If you have evidence of a crime, you know, wipe it way before you need to hand things over for examination and be in the position of having to destroy data as they knock on your door.
If it was evidence, what was the crime?
IMO, even if that's actually illegal, there's zero way to prove it that the fifth amendment doesn't address.
For instance, apparently answering questions up until a point at which you don't severely threatens your legal ability to invoke the 5th.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.gand.35...
To be charged with destruction of evidence, the data contained in the device has to be justified as such. It appears this was not the case, note this person was not indicted or accused of anything else too.
I'd be more worried about European democracies which don't put a limit on the tenure of a president or prime minister. It was a close call in Hungary and Poland. If Orban had won the elections he could've manipulated Hungarian institutions to such a degree that he'd be president for life with unlimited powers.
The same has already occurred in Turkiye. I chuckle at the Turks protesting against Erdogan. That ship sailed about 15 years ago, there's no way to remove him from power. The only thing they can do is wait until he passes.
It's naive to think it isn't already happening in the UK and elsewhere and has for a long time. The only thing technology is changing is to increase the depth and scope of what they surveil.
But worse that that, they have a population that thinks its fine as long as it's not the government, its just the free market doing its thing, and it's all about freedom for the most powerful
I think you're right, you see this sometimes where the powers that be are extremely over-confident in themselves and think "sure, let's put this thing up for referendum and show those stupid right-wingers how unpopular they really are." Which works until it doesn't.
A US example was Proposition 8 in California (banning same-sex marriage) in 2008. I have zero doubt the thinking was "sure, let's put it up for a vote and show those morons how behind the times they really are." When it passed, in _California_ no less, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and accusations of all sorts of treachery. Anything but doing a little self-reflection and considering that maybe it wasn't as popular an idea as they thought. Didn't matter in the end, courts said "yeah well too bad, you can't ban it anyway, sorry" (kind of funny those legal arguments never came up BEFORE it could even be put up for a vote, again showing the level of confidence on display).
What's shocking of course is that the Brexit vote didn't end up the same way ("ok the vote passed but it can't be done anyway").
All that happened was that Britain exchanged limited Eastern Euro immigration for unlimited non-EU immigration.
There was an attempt.
A campaigner managed to get the courts to issue a verdict that the referendum was not binding, and Parliament must then have a vote on whether or not to implement the result. Remain voters rejoiced and lauded her as a hero. Brexit voters demonised her as an enemy of democracy.
Parliament then duly voted to implement the result.
(Edit - looking back this may have been counterproductive. The argument that the referendum was not legally binding could have continued for some time, maybe even long enough to try to change something. But forcing a parliamentary vote to affirm the result put all that to bed)
Given one of the major themes of the leave campaign was "restoring parliamentary sovereignty", it's darkly ironic that leave also campaigned against parliament actually using that sovereignty, and indeed came closer than anyone else (including the EU) to restricting parliamentary sovereignty.
Their idea of sovereignty is telling everyone else what to do. They wrap this up in flags and Sptifire biscuit tin patriotism for the poorly educated, but it's all for show.
What they want is unlimited power over others. The EU has always been an obstacle to that.
The different nationalists - the Republicans in the US, the Putinists in Russia, the Zionists in Israel, the Brexiters in the UK, the Saudi oil imperialists - are all tentacles of the same creature, and more likely to cooperate with each other against their native populations than act independently.
Not only was it expected to fail at referendum, but the referendum itself was never really meant to happen.
> What's shocking of course is that the Brexit vote didn't end up the same way ("ok the vote passed but it can't be done anyway").
It went very much the opposite; they went for almost the most extreme possible version of the thing. A lot of people voting for Brexit had been sold on, basically, Norway's status (effectively in the EU, but can pretend not to be, and has its own rules on fish and can have whatever weird passports it wants). This is part of why support for it evaporated so quickly (the last time any serious poll showed staying out as having more support for rejoining was early 2022); the delivered product was simply not what most people had been sold.
(The British fisheries industry actually largely suffered due to Brexit, as British people don’t eat much fish, especially the fish available around Britain, and the industry was largely dependent on exports. But it’s the thought that counts, I suppose.)
Actually, IMO, it shows one of the weaknesses of our legal system.
The courts can't rule on something that someone's talking about doing. They can only rule on actual legislation.
It would genuinely be great if there were a formal legal process for writing a bill, submitting it to some particular court (maybe the top state appeals court?) for review, and only after that review letting it be voted into law.
Also you can ask anyone you like about your legislative proposal, including the judges of a court.
Leave 17,410,742 51.89% Remain 16,141,241 48.11%
Even a 55% requirement would be a lot better than a simple majority imo.
This way we get to see their project fail.
I don't know which one is worse.
...or we have to listen to some people whine?
Few? 51% is a few? I mean, I also think Brexit was a monumentally stupid decision, but 51% of people wanted it, no?
Even assuming that everyone who didn't vote would have voted for remain, given the voter turnout of 71% (which is already very high for any election, typical turnout is around 57%), 35% of people said yes. That's not a few, that a big chunk.
And in any case, the point of my post was the "suffering", not the "few".
The best you can say about the Brexit vote is that 51% wanted something other than the status quo.
It was recently the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote. Not a single firework.
And in this case, it would also mean that Britain would've joined the EU with a 55%+ majority as well.
The public were conned. The oligarch-adjacent ruling faction of the ruling class knew exactly what they were doing, the lack of specificity for any Leave plan was deliberate, the lies and propaganda were cynical and calculated, and they were delighted with the result.
Then they gave us Boris as the first of a succession of clown car comedy Prime Ministers, and started hyping Farage.
It's all a stage set. The public in the UK have zero influence on any of these developments.
Particularly when the scope of the EU seems to be a bit vague and regularly expanding to micromanage various aspects of life. It looks like they might be trying to rebuild the US federal government.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_membership_of_t...
The thinking being if a law isn't good/useful enough to garner 2/3rd support, it shouldn't be law. And if a law is so bad that it can't even get more than 1/3rd the people to support it, it should no longer be a law.
Sadly, I don't think it'd work today. People are too divided, it's too easy to import the votes you need, and people are too lazy to understand a law beyond the headline or what the news tells them about it.
What? That's not what you wrote. If it only takes 1/3rd to repeal a law, then you need to keep up 2/3rds support indefinitely, not 1/3rd.
And who and from where might folks "import" such votes? I don't understand what that means. Please do elucidate.
- Nigel Farage, May 2016
As for 16 years old voting, I'd argue the age to vote should be raised to 21.
> Some particularly pernicious lies on the leave side too convincing
Both sides lied, both sides exaggerated.
The referendum to simply leave or remain would never have happened if UK Parliament went to the public more often with referendums about various treaties such as Maastricht, Amsterdam and Rome. Giving people the illusion of choice would have been enough.
The UK seems to be an outlier for an arrogant Parliament that thinks it knows best, in spite of public sentiment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_related_to_the_Eur...
Also two years of growing into the political system is not very long compared to the decades of being able to vote.
Why? Brexit will impact 16 year olds for decades. A large number of the old farts who voted for it are dead now and won't have to suffer the consequences. If you're going to adjust voting ages but don't want to lower it, it makes sense that those over 75 don't get a say in something like Brexit.
And if your thought is that 16 year olds don't have the education yet to understand the implications of something so big, I'd say they're much better informed than most people over 60 who are consuming Facebook AI slop and believing it wholesale.
Also, part of getting older and wiser, and becoming more aware of history, is knowing the damage that old people like us have done at times. It was people our age who caused the failure of May '68, for example.
You must meet extremely weird old people. Most old people care a lot about the future of their "offspring". Also they have already seen a lot and are able to see through influence much better.
>And if your thought is that 16 year olds don't have the education yet to understand the implications of something so big, I'd say they're much better informed than most people over 60 who are consuming Facebook AI slop and believing it wholesale.
Care to back this claim?
If a change would be large and far-reaching and painful to undo, then it should be more difficult to make. Not impossible, of course: sometimes you need to make large far-reaching hard-to-undo changes. But imagine the following situation: about half the population likes X and about half hates it, and every year we hold a referendum on whether to have X or not. Then about once every two years you flip between X and not-X and all the upheaval costs you more than the gain from whichever is the better choice would get you.
So before making a big upheaval-inducing change on the grounds that The People want it, you should have good evidence that The People really do, which means one referendum with a result much more decisive than 51:49, or maybe a series of 51:49 referenda all going the same way.
If I were setting up something like this and could choose the rules, they would be something like: we run a referendum every couple of years until we get a decisive result; a side that won the last N referenda needs a 20%/(N+1) margin to get its way. So, first time round you need to be 60-40 ahead to settle the question; if you won the first time then you only need 55-45 the second time; if you win again but still more narrowly than that then you only need about 53-47 next time; etc. If one position really does consistently have majority support it'll win eventually even if its advantage is narrow. If public opinion is very changeable then too bad, a decision will have to wait until The People have a strong enough opinion to measure with confidence.
(Obviously nothing like that will ever happen. Too geeky and complicated.)
Of course, that wasn't the only major problem with the Brexit referendum. The other catastrophic problem was that it was a choice between "stay in the EU", a well defined outcome with known good and bad points, and "leave the EU somehow", something that could mean dozens of different things. It should have been between "stay in" and "attempt to negotiate terms for leaving, and then hold another referendum on whether to go ahead". Or between "stay in" and "leave on such-and-such terms if we can get them, and otherwise ask again". Or the government should have held extensive negotiations first on what terms it could leave on, and then held a referendum on whether to leave on those terms. Or the referendum could have offered options "stay regardless of terms", "leave regardless of terms", and "leave if such-and-such terms can be achieved". Those possibilities are all pretty unsatisfactory, but they're all better than choosing between the status quo and An Undertaking Of Great Advantage But Nobody To Know What It Is.
A leave voter would argue for exactly the same thing - a clear majority need to vote to remain. If a majority vote isn't a majority vote, what's the point of calling yourself a 'democracy' and virtue signalling to the rest of the planet how great your governance is?
> a well defined outcome with known good and bad points
How so? What was the well-defined defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? What's your time horizon? Was that outcome still true in 1980, 1999, 2026? How does being a member of the EU make you immune to probability and chance? Was a 'well defined outcome' in 1973 that, under the Blair government, we would allow East European nationals with freedom of movement to migrate en-masse to the UK, and that, ironically, is claimed to be one of the reasons for the leave vote.
It's actually quite sad to me that in 2026 the whole thing is still so tribal. Everything promised by either side largely never came to pass, and it's now a decade on. I just wish both sides would recognise that it's been over three decades of continuous poor Government that's the root of most of the UK's problems, and spend their energy fixing that instead.
But that's exactly what I'm saying is importantly not symmetrical. Making major changes has extra costs beyond the advantages and disadvantages of being in one state or another.
There is a symmetry here, one you remarked on earlier, but it maps the Brexit referendum not to itself with roles reversed but to earlier EU-related decisions that were made without referenda. You could absolutely argue that, say, signing the Treaty of Maastricht was a major change that the individual states involved shouldn't have made without consulting their populations. I'm not sure I agree -- see below for why -- but it's definitely the same sort of issue as with Brexit.
The reason why I'm not sure I agree is that the entry of the UK into the EU was done gradually. The UK joined the EEC (without a referendum at the time, but there was one a few years later on whether to stay, which a large majority voted for, suggesting that joining without an explicit referendum was maybe a reasonable step), which was a substantially less major change than joining the EU would have been if it had existed then, and then the EU gradually increased its scope: Maastricht, Amsterdam, Lisbon. The combined effect of all those things was large, but each individual step was smaller, less risky, and (maybe) more undo-able.
(I do think, on balance, that probably each step should have been subject to referenda in the countries affected, with rejection triggering a rethink of how much European integration to aim for how quickly.)
If the proponents of Brexit had been able to divide Brexit into phases, each much smaller, less risky, and more undo-able than the whole, then that would have had many advantages and the downsides of a simple-majority referendum would have been less, though they'd still have been big changes and I think should still have needed more than a bare plurality of votes. I don't know whether any such thing could actually have been done, and kinda suspect not.
> If a majority vote isn't a majority vote [...]
Not every vote has to be a majority vote. Being a democracy doesn't mean that at every instant you do what The Majority wants at that instant, no matter how slimly it prefers that. Not because there's anything particularly wrong with The Majority, but because like an individual it may change how it feels too often for that to be a good idea.
(Likewise, having my own interests at heart doesn't mean that at every instant I do what I want to at that instant. That's why we have things like marriages and contracts and deliberately-established habits. My preferences are noisy and benefit from a bit of low-pass filtering, and I think the same is true of almost everyone. So we deliberately get ourselves into commitments it takes some effort to get out of. We can still get out of them -- you can get divorced, quit your job, explicitly break off a friendship, etc. -- but it's to our advantage that those things aren't so easy to do and we will only do them when we are really quite sure that they're a good idea. I think research suggests that most people are a bit too reluctant to make such changes, but the amount of friction we want getting in their way isn't zero.)
> What was the well-defined outcome of the UK joining the EEC in 1973? [...]
I am bemused by the question because I never so much as vaguely hinted that there was any such thing. I said that in 2016 the option of staying in the EU was a well-defined one with known advantages and disadvantages, unlike the "leave the EU somehow but no one's specifying any details at this time" option it was opposed to on the ballot papers.
I completely agree that joining the EEC in 1973 was not like that. That too was a major change, though a smaller one because the EEC was a smaller deal than the EU became over time, and holding a referendum on that (with something more than a mere plurality being required to proceed) would probably have been a good idea. As I said above, the result of the referendum held not long after suggests that joining would probably have won by a comfortable margin, in which case holding a referendum wouldn't have made much difference -- but as a matter of principle I'm in favour of explicitly running such things past The People unless it's already very clear what they want.
(I am inclined to think that most things major enough to need a referendum are also major enough that if there's a "change" and a "don't change" option the latter should need some kind of supermajority.)
> And if that went to a referendum should be 60-40? What happens if it were 59.9-40.1 ?
If it was set up with a 60-40 threshold then 59.9-40.1 means no change, just as if it was set up 50-50 then 49.9-50.1 means no change. I'm not sure what the problem's supposed to be here.
I can definitely support that. It seemed to basically boil down to "you dirty proles aren't going to stop poor Tarquin going on Erasmus are you? :'("
The vote should have been, should we entertain this idea?
If yes, a second referendum on what Leave actually means when it comes to the final decision point.
Y'know the same way that any remotely functioning democracy would approach something this large and nebulous.
Iceland being just the most recent example.
Instead the vote was "life carries on as is" vs "something changes", with no clarity of what that change is.
Given the state of the UK post austerity there is no surprise the vote for "I don't want more of this" was so high.
That's the incredible failing of the UK democratic process here, Cameron foremost.
As a safe far away island, the UK has much more use in a captive alliance to defend a threatened continent than it is as a participant in Europe that gets special exemptions. And Europe already has them for that.
You personally might have wanted to remain and wanted to raise the bar, but that's undemocratic, you can't just change the rules when you don't get the outcome you wanted.
I'm not from Britain, honestly I don't care what you guys do, but a majority of voters decided in a way they did, and you have to respect that.
I said 16 yo should've had a Brexit vote/say because, especially in this case, it's the kids that reap the choices made.
More Generally 16 year olds are old enough to take part in democracy vote-wise, and maybe in all votes too. The point being - look at the short term, actually make that 'not long term', policies being made now by us olds, they don't favor young people, on the whole - or their children.
But as a society, we've decided that 16 year olds are too young to do many proper things, be it buy alcohol in most countries, drive a car in many, open a bank account, or legally jerk off to porn. They don't watch the news, they have no recollection of previous governments and the promises that were made, never kept and are being made again, they have basically zero sense of taxes and also mostly don't pay any and have little experience with anything related to politics. Neither do most 18 year olds, but if we let them buy booze and drive, we also let them vote.
Usually the push for younger voters comes, when someone prefers a push to a generally more "left" side of spectrum, but even this is turning around, since in my country (slovenia) more and more younger voters are turning right (eg. in the last election), especially young men, since they feel left out by the "left" parties.
Also worth pointing out that the hard Brexit we got, where we left Schengen and abandoned much of our cross-European programmes, was almost unthinkable, and not seriously considered by the media. Whenever it was brought up, it was decried as “project fear” by those who pushed for it.
That's not an argument, that is not liking the result.
These were not only ads, but shadow ads; they were different per person and effectively couldn't be vetted (if I have the technical underpinnings wrong do let me know)
It's bad regardless of which political side or issue you support. You go on FB to talk to your friends and you get... that? Come on now, Zuck. Remember the human
Including those who pushed for Brexit. Farage gave a speech accepting a defeat around midnight, the value of GBP skyrocketed for a moment etc.
The referendum was supposed to be a tool for the political class to wrestle each other, not a real life changing decision. Turns out if you fuel enough BS you may not be able to control it.
The same for this fear mongering about evil people messaging in secret each other. It’s not a real discussion, if someone should lose their privacy its the people in power. Make it illegal having secret messaging for politicians and people rich beyond some point. The danger doesn’t come from some regular people talking about something nasty in secret, the danger comes from billionaires talking secretly with politicians. We should have been able to see the messages that led the pro-brexit billionaire "gifting" Farage 5 million GBP. Of course the secrecy is needed even for the politicians and the super rich but we should be able to "debug" them, we should be able to have a committee or something of that sort that will be able to decrypt and check all their communications when needed.
The more interesting difference is surely in how the elite responds to unexpected referendum results. Plenty of mainland Europeans assumed that Brexit would somehow be canceled (which was surely the right thing to do on paper). That was never going to happen. British political culture sacralizes majorities. Canceling a referendum "victory" is as anathema as proportional representation, coalition government, or limits on parliamentary sovereignty. This (IMO archaic) understanding of democracy partly explains the Brexit result itself.
I'm genuinely curious what you would offer as an alternative? Democracy should ignore the majority if it disagrees with the controlling cabal who hold the correct opinions?
I much prefer the ranked choice system here in Australia. I’m sure there are flaws, but you tend to end up with candidates who are more representative of the wishes of the electorate, and you eliminate that “I’d better vote for A in case B gets in” vote-splitting thing.
The big coalition in Australian politics, the LNP, has been integrated enough (in most states) to share a platform and field single candidates, giving people that choice ahead of time. We haven’t had a post-election coalition formed in some time.
But I think you might be thinking more of PR systems rather than preferential votes. In Preferential systems you still have a single winner of a given constituency, but the method of choosing that winner is more focused on a wide basis of support rather than on just who has the most votes.
I.E. if you have three parties for a seat, Centre-right gets 40% of the vote, Centre-left gets 35, “Legalise Everything Dudes!” get 25.
Under FPTP Centre-right takes it.
In a preference vote, we discard LED and count its voters’ second preference. Let’s say the split is 4:1 left/right. This leads us to Centre Right getting 45%, Centre left on 55% and the seat goes left. In this case we end up with a candidate acceptable to a larger part of the electorate. And the existence of LED didn’t split any votes, you can’t say a vote for a smaller party is wasted in this system, or blame smaller-party voters for Right getting in rather than left.
Under PR you’d split the seats in the parliament by national vote share (as in the Australian Senate)
look at the last few governments, now imagine that we had a system that meant it was impossible to form a government if the government wasn't popular. there is no natural majority for any position that a political party in the UK can realistically take.
you don't end up with greater democracy, you end up handing unlimited power to unelected people working in government who end up being the only source of administrative stability
one of the main problems is that people in the UK who are in politics often disagree with voters at a fundamental level. changing the electoral system will not fix this. you will have elections, they will say they will fix problems they don't want to fix to win the election, and then their popularity will plummet shortly after as the insiders take over and do weird stuff that no-one voted for or wants. when you have governments that are repeatedly unable to perform very basic state functions, the problem is not the electoral system (or voters, one of the unusual aspects of politics in the UK is the blame and contempt that politicians have for voters, it is easy to see on this thread...perhaps you realise why they want proportional representation now).
If the people aren't capable of handling an issue, who is? Bureaucrats who are...elected democratically?
Brexit's issue is that it can't be easily reversed, I don't understand why they don't just hold another referendum and undo everything.
A) I get voted in if I give the people what they want
B) The people don't want to be spied on
C) I increase spying
D) ???
E) Profit!
I'm still hazy on the details. But the politicians really can't plead ignorance. At least in the US you regularly hear things like "the Senate convened at 11:30pm on Friday night to push through unpopular legislation". They know.
I see you follow the EU model of democracy; keep putting matters up for a vote until you get the result you want.
Despite what you may have been led to believe, there's still a substantial number of British people that reject EU membership, and this goes beyond the "racist" and "economically illiterate" arguments that remainers typically fall back on. I would suggest you do what your predecessors did not and consider the consequences of losing.
Even if there were a UK referendum where a clear majority voted to rejoin the EU as a member state, not at the top table, our return to the EU depends on the EU accepting our application. We burned a lot of bridges on exit that we need to rebuild.
And also the favourite party to win in the next election is spearheaded by the very people who orchestrated Brexit. The EU will not be receptive while it seems that a majority of people are still voting for an anti-EU party.
The sensible course for rejoining is to work towards Schengen or similar, while acting as a partner state in good faith for a decade or two.
Except nothing logical or sensible is ever done by the government. Which means it won't happen. At least not in the next 10 years.
By the time they come to that conclusion it will be 2035. And starting any talks or preparation would take at least another 5 years if not 10 given how slow these things move. And that is on the assumption public is not against it.
We are looking at 2046. The probability of Scotland breaking out and join the EU is higher than that happening.
Actually yes. Some opinions change simply by being required to engage with the topic.
If it came back with a similar slim majority to rejoin, would the EU even want us given the very high chance of us leaving again?
The same interests also conspire to keep people preoccupied with basic needs and distractions that leave them with little time to properly research issues.
Assuming ‘it’s not their fault’ also removes consequences and/or accountability, which also encourages the behavior.
Democracy usually does not come with À la carte options.
For example, for issues taxing the rich (TR), taxing the poor (TP), spending on military (SM), spending on infrastructure (SI), privacy protection (PP), and privacy intrusion (PI) and parties A, C, and D, which support TR/SM/PP, TP/SI/PP, and TR/SI/PI, the coalitions the three parties must form to pass individual bills may get you what you really wanted: TR/SI/PP, even though none of the three parties individually support all three.
Truth is no one really cares.
Fifty representatives randomly selected from a pool of a 300 million has a high chance of being supermajority non-representative.
/s
If i wasn't busy, local politics is where one could make a difference. Nation politics seems completely captured by now.
So no, people don’t vote for such things - they vote for parties who turn out to do such things at some point.
- Education is not "elite", it's open to all.
- Informed is not "educated".
Forcing political speech to be truthful (or at least have a reasonable expectation of being truthful) with serious consequences (jail time) for knowingly lying would go a long way to counter the misinformation that caused Brexit.
In the days after the Brexit vote, it turned out that a significant minority of 'leave' voters had been convinced that their vote would be an ineffectual protest with no actual influence on Britain's membership of the EU. Lazy and cynical anti-democratic rhetoric just feeds into that cycle of ignorance and stupidity.
They can even argue it was the will of the people to get a dictorship.
Is there an example where "they" have not done that?
Boy, the number of hours to research candidates & propositions on the last ballot in California…
+1 to this.
"I didn't thing it would actually happen!" IIRC there were polls soon after asking people if they'd change their vote or vote the same way again, and there was a fair amount of people saying they would have voted remain had they known.
Madness really
What annoys me is that Farage said something like "if it's 50.1% remain then this is not over" I.e. he'd be calling for a recount or a second vote. Yet it was basically that for leave and we got no recount or second vote. Similar deal for Scottish independence referendum... They keep on seeming to want to do another one so they get the answer they want, despite it being shutdown fairy recently.
Several counterfactuals are plausible: either the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go, or they would've brexited even if remain won, or they don't care either way. What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote, because in that case they simply wouldn't have left.
>the elite only allowed the vote because they knew how it would go
Clearly not, in this case. Remain was forecasted to win, and David Cameron called the referendum because he felt confident that remain would win.
>they would've brexited even if remain won
This also is obviously not the case. David Cameron would have remained Prime Minister. He was always in favor of EU membership, remaining in the EU was part of the policy platform of his party, and he would have been under much less pressure from Brexiteers than he was before the referendum.
>What is not possible is that the elites wanted to remain but were forced to leave by the vote
This is in fact what happened. David Cameron resigned after losing the vote and was replaced by someone committed to implementing Brexit.
Perhaps that they're wonderfully trusting people who believe whatever politicians that Gary down the pub thinks are the best ?
In the broader scheme of things you could also see this in the response of Brexiteers who were stunned that, as non members they now weren't able to travel freely across borders.
Voters aren't very bright because they're people, you've met people. I used to think that FPTP was a good idea because it's so simple that "The candidate who had more votes won" means the idiots won't be confused by the outcome. We saw that they're confused anyway, so, fine, since apparently simplicity wasn't achievable we should use a more complicated voting system with better outcomes.
Before you get ranty at me - I voted remain. But your comment is revisionist. The pro-Brexit shysters were not in power. After the referendum, whichever way it went, the pro-Brexit people were not going to be given power, it was not an election.
They had no mandate to implement anything. Any plan they promised would have been irrelevant to the UK government and had no more force than you or I scribbling on a pub napkin.
You know who was in power, who was in a position to make a plan, arguably whose duty it was to make a contingency plan if the referendum went south?
The very pro-EU faction at the head of the Tory government. But they didn’t. They told the public they weren’t making a plan so that it didn’t look like a low-risk option that the country could go for and be OK. The lack of plan was no accident, it was a Remain-side tactic.
The Brexiteers were/are wrong, hateful, shysters in so many ways. But your ire in this specific case should be aimed squarely at David Cameron. The Brexit shysters just didn’t have any power, and Brexit voters voted without a plan because it was the choice they were given.
> The very pro-EU faction at the head of the Tory government.
When has any tory ever been pro-eu? i think you're misremembering how things went down.
Do you believe that either Leave.EU or Farage’s circus had the power to make a binding exit plan? How? What powers do you believe they had to do so?
> It's not about the people in power, it was about the media. They controlled the narrative, and they were the ones that convinced everyone of illegal bendy bananas
Errr, so the media should have made a plan? Not sure what you’re on about there really?
> When has any tory ever been pro-eu?
Osborne and Cameron were both very pro-EU. Ken Clark (now retired) has always been very pro-EU. Generally the “business is good” side of the Tories were pretty europhile. They have since been hounded out of the party, AFAICT, by the likes of BoJo.
> i think you're misremembering how things went down.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/20/david-camer...
“David Cameron’s government committed an act of gross negligence and deepened the uncertainty surrounding the impact of Brexit by instructing Whitehall not to make any contingency plans for a vote to leave the EU”
https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-05-07/seven-ou...
I think that the Brexit vote landed at a time when there was increasing general alienation within society, a general feeling of growing wealth inequality, of social injustice etc. We saw it with Trump's election, we saw it with Brexit. We'll probably see it with a reform majority in the UK parliament next election too.
There are global trends that the PM of the UK cannot change, but we live in a world of instant gratification so if the current PM can't make things change literally overnight, people are angry and annoyed.
Go read the comments section on any UK newspaper (left or right, tabloid or broadsheet) and the comments are really eye-opening (recommend doing this to at least get a flawed and partial cross section of what the vibe is). People are quick to anger and quick to point fingers. Might explain why we've had so many PMs these past few years.
Hmm GDP was growing well, inflation was down, real household income was on the rise, annual wage growth was on the up, it was a long time since the great financial crash, unemployment was crashing in 2013/2014, and things comparatively were quite cheap.
Though I can't recall the general sentiment at the time. Net migration did have an historic spike (part of a longer term rise) for a couple of years. Perhaps the Brexit campaigners capitalised solely on that?
Crazy to imagine that economically things were doing great, by many metrics, but so many people got duped into thinking some foreigners were going to tank everything
(Personally, it was a fantastic period. Wages were good, jobs were good, things were cheap. I know many people who bought their first house during that period)
A lot of this probably comes down to cheap-credit. I am by rights in the top 1% of national income in my senior-ish BigCo job, yet I look around at the traffic lights and I am surrounded by Range Rovers, Teslas, Porches SUVs etc. I dont think I could afford one of those (I tend to buy 3 or 4 year old cars outright), yet the stats say I earn more than 99% of people ... either most days I am surrounded by the 0.1% club, or people are spending a lot of their income in PCP etc.
Is it a matter of "keeping up with the jonses"? Are people thinking "Well these people around me are driving nice cars and I am not, so clearly I am getting dicked over here somehow and everyone else is earning boatloads and I am not." Replace nice cars with expensive holidays, house renovations, latest iphone, latest shoes/handbag or whatever. And all amplified and magnified by social media. Its all the same: conspicuous status baubles making people feel like they're on the loser end of the spectrum.
See enough of that over and over (and you will if you use social media) and it'll shift your world views.
You quite often read statistics about how so few people have more than like £3k in savings and, to me, I can never understand how. But when you start to look around you at how many people are living this "buy now, pay later" lifestyle you start to realise that, actually, for many this is just the norm.
My brother's gf is the personification of this. She dropped out of A levels straight away, got accepted onto a nail salon apprenticeship which turned out just to be a way for the owner to get cheap labour, as is common with many of these I understand. So now she just works 3 days a week for a few hours at a time doing nails. But she always has the latest iPhone, always buying shed loads of clothes and other consumerist crap. No idea how she funds it, my parents think my brother's being taken for a ride
It was about right wing elites deciding which migrants they wanted, and at best about regaining control of that policy from the EU. It was sold in a racist and bigoted way.
The reason we have less control over illegal migration is exactly Brexit, which, as people were warned at the time, torpedoed our actually cushioned position with respect to "first safe country" asylum rules, and meant we had no cross-border agreements with France.
The "Brexit" that people thought they were getting was always in their own mind because it had no definition. It was an imaginary victory which only has downsides, just as was pointed out.
The trick is to have a two party system and agree on all the important points.
There aren't any major parties willing to reduce espionage or ease up on Gaza.
If elections are coming up, they stick to gender theory, school sports or Lake Ontario.
"Vote blue no matter what" doesn't give you privacy, nor does abstaining or voting red.
This is the exact characteristic about US politics that Americans wish were removed so their government was better for them. It favors a two party system, so no one is actually represented and have to choose between two parties they likely only agree with on few points, unless they are subscribed to that party's propogandic kool-aid.
It always converges to a two-party system eventually, the US just speedran the process.
When one party is secure in a seat and the second is weak, other parties can challenge each other for second place. For example libertarians could try to beat republicans in a place where republicans do poorly.
> European Commission Revives Push for Encryption Backdoors in ProtectEU Strategy, Framing Mass Surveillance as “Lawful Access”
https://reclaimthenet.org/eu-protecteu-strategy-encryption-b...
I guess it is true for certain people who no longer distinguish between their life and browsing the web…
In theory everybody supports healthy eating, in practice most people are overweight or obese.
In theory everybody thinks exercising, energy conservation, caring for the environment is good, in practice almost no one does it.
In theory everybody thinks studying and reading good books is a good thing, in practice most people just want to switch off their brains in front of the television or social media.
Most people lie mostly to themselves. Politicians and marketers know this, that's why they only tell people the lies they want to hear.
That sacrifice didn't see fruit for two decades until the Reform Act 1832 opened the franchise to allow more the right to vote.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
Privacy shouldnt be privilege or for tech-savvy only.
Freedom of speech cant be regulated without being lost.
Speech is regulated widely in many ways. There is no country with absolute freedom of speech.
Of course Brits are going to answer that they'd rather not have the government read their private correspondence. But at the same time there has been very little protest over draconian legislation in the UK like the Online Safety Act and RIPA Part 3 that cover just these aspects.
Nobody is stopping anyone protesting against it, but it is not imposed by some imaginary uniparty fascist regime, it is something people want.
And protesting is very difficult when everyone doing so is branded a child molester.
Britain isn't a true democracy. Neither is Australia. They're Orwellian societies where the populace has been trained to believe that "the government knows best."
But again, most Brits are using WhatsApp anyway; end-to-end security is wholly meaningless in that context.
I don't really recognise this "branded a child molester" accusation either, TBH. That seems fantastical but I suspect you are not British.
There are plenty of people on the right (e.g. in Reform) making reasonable points about the burden of requiring adults to identify themselves to access legal material and people are not branding them child molesters (not least because that sort of screeching typically comes from the right).
The simple reality is that in the UK the majority don't think it's that troublesome, in general, that adults should have to prove they are adults to access adult material (or use a VPN, which the government is actually not acting to ban or add new regulations to). We already have default adult content blocks on mobile data, for example (and the adult content block, once disabled, can therefore be used as a way to identify adulthoot).
I tend to find that foreign observers, especially American foreign observers, always tend to conjure up really abstract arguments about inalienable fundamental rights, reduce everything to freedom of speech, whatever.
Life is messier and more complex and despite our more nuanced, complex set of laws, they are more moderate than various laws from US states, and it is not the UK that is the first to run headlong into fascism: that is happening in the USA, which voted for it.
British law is untidy. Life is untidy. We aren't fucking idiots or ill-informed children. We just draw the lines differently.
We should be trying to give people what they want in the best possible way. Otherwise, other people (with ulterior motives) will give it to them in the worst possible way.
For kid's online safety, it would be sufficient for each device to ask upon installation if it's for an adult or a kid, and send that as an HTTP header to each website. We should recommend that, so we don't get a much worse solution to the very real problem - such as UKOSA.
But the voices call for "robust" systems... And some parties are trying to implement that, and from there difficulties I mentioned in the other post.
And you would accept a device that would require a third party for setup?!?!?!
That is what I meant with "either proving identity or lunatic workarounds"...
That "robust enough" is full grounds to have a population rise, given that an expectable combination of stupidity as ineptitude and stupidity as radical psychosis from the state can shift the "robust enough" to substantial dystopia. Have they (the keir starmer bunch) or have they not issued a law without the crucial details - how to do it, the whole matter is absurd without full clarity on "how to do it"?
You implied in your parent post that «requir[ing] a cellphone store employee to [set the age of an owner on the device]» would be acceptable. We refuse radically to have devices that require third parties («cellphone store employee[s]» to finalize setup.
This (a law with a separate binding statutory instrument to implement it) is actually a pretty normal formulation of British law. It's not unique to this situation, nor is it a sign of malfeasance. It's worked pretty well before, it is far from unscrutinised (the statutory instruments pass through at least one cross-party committee) and they save us from the absurdity of massive, fully complete legislation written by lobbyists that representatives cannot meaningfully read and end up stuffed with pork barrel, special interest and unrelated legislation.
The law is voted on in the Commons on the basis that a statutory instrument will not exceed its reach. Committees make sure they don't; laws get amended if they do. (Cross-party committees work better in the UK than in the USA)
Again: we do law a bit differently here. I do not think it necessarily inferior to US law.
Surely there exist cases where details are unimportant - but normally what counts is achieving in the conception of a solution, because pointing at the problem is trivial. Setting an abstract goal is a no-cost effort; navigating the "compromises" is the actual work.
As I wrote, «the whole matter is absurd without full clarity on "how to do it"?»: plainly the issue is "how to have an age verification mechanism" when it clashes with the basicmost right to anonimity, and not defining the crucial detail consists in abysmal levels of inability and in criminal terror.
Remember that the australian side (which moved first) framed it as "no underage access to encyclopedias, no underage access to search engines": age verification, i.e. identity verification or other "nonsense" to access encyclopedias and search engines. In the USA, some voices would include LLMs. Remember that in the uk Wikipedia had to win against the state to get exception under the mandate from keir starmer - it "exceptionally won", and after having lost at a first stage.
The privacy of online browsing and the privacy of messaging are equally critical, yes.
(Edit: if you wish to really rank them, then a guy looking behind your shoulders when you are reading a book is more dystopian and farcical than a guy looking behind your shoulders when you are writing a letter - yes.)
We are talking about "Brits" here. But you seem to be stating that California has tackled the issue and deliberated that - do I understand correctly? - somebody installs an OS on a machine and sets manually, without verification, a date of birth for the user (setting that will be shared with relevant servers).
Are you sure that that would be the way Britain is going to implement it? Why have not britons raised to get that crucial detail very, very clear? We understood that past limitations involved people using webcams in the uk to access forbidden sites.
And the eu? That Californian decision does not seem to have conditioned the eu much: the eu idea is that you should have an "official OS" with the technical capabilities required by the open source age-verifying "app" to get access.
(And I would insist: forbidding access to the video museum to those in the formative age is one of the most blatant events in history. That happened in britain, it just happened. To call the world reaction disproportionately absent is an understatement.)
The good thing to push is demanding decent administrations and operators (e.g. in information systems), selected from and evaluated by decent neighborhoods.
I also said that if we should "want a good thing" and push for it, that would be a decent society of capable people from which capable administrators (and journalists and communicators all the interfaces from decision makers to public) are selected: decent societies would vocally demand what is due and decent administrations would provide it, and that would radically avoid the horrible mess and subsequent terror that incompetence and feeblemindedness and twisted incentives are instead currently generating.
For many that lived during the times of the Stazi in East Germany, or late Soviet days, or currently in China and North Korea however...
Ask one of those people who survived those regimes and ask if they should "just get over yourself" -- it shouldn't be too hard to find one.