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The Brexit Thread

Matt N

Matt N

CF Legend
Hi guys. Sorry if this thread turns out to be a little controversial, but I thought it might be an interesting topic to discuss, as it is a very current political issue that will end up affecting many of us on this forum in some way.

So; Brexit. We all know about it a little too well at this point in time. But what do you want to see happen? Today is a very significant day in the Brexit process; MPs are being presented with 8 different options today about what to do, and Theresa May today announced that she will resign after the first stage of Brexit negotiations is over.

There are many options on the table, but which of these would you like to see? Would you like a second referendum? Or would you prefer a softer Brexit? Or maybe a no-deal Brexit is more to your taste? Or maybe even no Brexit at all? Or possibly something else entirely that I haven't suggested?

As for my opinion on the whole Brexit charade; I know I'm a bit young to have an opinion on all of this, but to tell you the truth, I never wanted to leave the EU in the first place. I like the idea of easy travel between European countries, I like the funding we get and I like being part of the culturally diverse society that the EU provides. But as for which option I'd like to see; my gut tells me that I'd like to see either a 2nd referendum or the revoking of Article 50, but that would be in violation of the result, and the government needs to honour the result of the 2016 referendum. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure which option would be best for the UK at this point.

But what are your opinions on this rather divisive topic?​
 
Whether you voted to leave or remain, I think we can all agree that that shambolic shower of sh*t in Westminster have made a right pigs ear of it. They got us into this mess, and they seem completely incapable of (or unwilling to) get us out of it. I reckon the solution, therefore, is to let that self-serving, overpaid rabble bicker amongst themselves for as long as they like while the rest of us, who live in the real world, if we all just get on with life and deal with our own problems as and when they arise, everything will be rosy, regardless of what those f*ckwits in suits come up with.

I mean, isn't that how it's always worked anyway?
 
There was a EU rule that came onto force recently which essentially saved air travel for UK operators and all their crew. I have been extremely worried about all this Brexit stuff, especially when parliament couldn't agree on a deal. Like would I be able to operate on any aircraft as I hold a British passport with an Irish attestation of training. It has been a worrying time indeed.
 
In this period of time as well, where we have no clue what will happen, it makes all the little things more difficult. For example, I've applied to attend a conference in Germany in summer; part of that included showing I had health insurance / an EHIC. Of course, an EHIC could be useless in the case of a no deal, so it makes the whole thing slightly more complicated. A small thing I know, but it's these things which all add up really. Plus, when on earth is the best time to buy Euros? Who knows.

I sit firmly in the camp for there to be a second referendum about if we should leave at all. I voted to Remain, and when the leave vote came through, I hated the result, but accepted it. But in the months and years afterwards, it's clear that many (many, not all) people who voted to leave made their decision to do so based on lies, muddied information and a lack of understanding. Would the number of people who now realise this be enough to change the vote? I reckon so. And that's still democratic, because people are allowed to change their mind, especially when new information presents itself.

Don't get me wrong, I accept there's good reasons for us to leave the EU, but I think the benefits outweigh the negatives. I equally am not disillusioned enough to think we will have Article 50 revoked, because of the state of the people in our government.
 
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It’s tricky as the whole leave/remain debate has knocked down the barriers between the left and the right. The typical right wing voters are keen leavers (even though the EU is very pro big business and pro capitalism) and the left wing voters are typically remainers who hate capitalism and big business but want to remain part of the undemocratic EU which hammers home capitalist ideologies and strives for privatisation and competition. Many remainers support Corbyn in his quest for renationalisation of the railways and infrastructure, something that the EU will not allow to happen under their law.

It’s ludicrous that both the Tories and the opposition are both remain but are leading the negotiations, although I firmly believe Corbyn does want to leave the EU he just doesn’t want to loose the younger remainer electorate. Labour must have their eye on the next GE given how this unfolding and how May has now said she’ll resign if her plan goes through.

Anyway, one of my biggest bug bears is the notion that anyone who voted to leave did so because of the lies and generally horrific press campaigns involved. I voted remain but I am not blind to the faults of the EU and limited purpose it serves in today’s society and I will certainly not tar every leave voter with the same ‘you voted leave because you hate iMaGrUnTs’ brush. This is the problem with the leave campaign but also why it won, they campaigned to leave for the wrong reasons but in doing so attracted a large amount of the population, (as @gavin referred to the gammons). If Corbyn were to have headed up a leave campaign based on honest truths and anti capitalist values there could have been another close referendum and more of a leave argument but UKIP saw a substantial racism problem and exploited that reason for leaving instead.

As for May’s negotiations, they haven’t been great, but the EU have to play hardball, they’ve got to earn their salaries somehow and once one country leaves they must have an eye on the domino effect.
 
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All very insightful comments. Really interesting to read your opinions on this as mine pretty much boiled down to 'want to stay in EU because I want to go lots of european holidays without hassle and I don't want small metal bands to have to pay more for UK Visas to play shows over here'. I've never really got much of a grasp on it as everywhere I look I'm being told different things and those are just the bits that mattered to me.

What I would really like to know though is, how do you think this will effect the UK theme park industry? Will we see a change or will it just further cement the Merlin monopoly?
 
I'm Remain and always have been. My main point being that the free travel zone works both ways. A lot of people complain that the free travel area allows for immigrants to come in and "steal our jobs" (i.e. take the jobs we wouldn't want anyway like warehouse workers or binmen) but it allows us to travel as well. A lot of people currently enjoy the cheap "lads holidays" to drink abroad in the likes of Malaga or Tenerife. Those are almost certainly gone now, along with all the "expats" living in Spain or Germany. Even some of the minor things like free mobile phone roaming will disappear.

@Slamming Coastercore brings up a good point about easy coaster trips abroad for us as well. I currently have a Netherlands based roadtrip planned, taking my UK car across on the ferry. Now unsure as to what Brexit will mean for that with possibly needing extra paperwork and insurance.

Many people also complain about the state of our road network without realising almost every large road project has EU money invested into it, especially here in Wales. Willing to bet that little to no large schemes will get built after Brexit.

Found it funny a while back when talking to an avid Brexiteer over a couple of pints in a Cardiff pub. He owns and operates a small local building firm and voted Leave. He admitted to once hiring immigrants but has since since to hiring only Britons. He admitted that the Britons don't work as hard and demand higher pay, meaning his profit margins were already down. Don't come complaining to me when you have to close your business after Brexit....

Sorry for the rant here, just wanted to vent a bit. May add more in time...
 
gavin said:
It should NEVER have been put to the public in the first place.
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This.

The reason we have a government is to make decisions like this for joe public who mostly don’t really know anything about EU membership.

Only reason it was initially put to the public was the Tories way of capturing all the UKIP votes and Cameron would become PM which worked for them.

They gambled by offering a referendum believing remain would win anyway and they will be in power. The gamble didn’t pay off and now we are in this mess.

Personally I just hope they get on with it remain or leave. Although we all know it’s most probably going to be extended on for years with more uncertainty.
 
One of the first things that struck me on that depressing day the referendum result came in was "how the f*ck are they going to deal with the Northern Ireland border issue?"

Fast forward over two and a half years and (unless I missed something) they STILL don't have any workable solutions.
 
spicy said:
This.
Only reason it was initially put to the public was the Tories way of capturing all the UKIP votes and Cameron would become PM which worked for them.
They gambled by offering a referendum believing remain would win anyway and they will be in power. The gamble didn’t pay off and now we are in this mess.
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Exactly this.

The entire debacle is down to Tory party in-fighting and arrogance.
A political open-goal for Labour..... and they have totally missed it.

Donkeys, all of them.

--

In more amusing news, they lost another vote today. That's 3-0 then. When do we get another go?
 
Whenever I feel guilty because of too much procrastination, or otherwise being very uneffective, I think of Brexit and I feel better :D Even at the highest levels of power they don't seem to know what they are doing!...

While I do have serious criticism about the EU - too much power given to the unelected Commission, the ideological emphasis on strict austerity policies, and the whole sluggish feel of it - I also think many politicians use the European Union as an easy scapegoat for their own failures. The benefits of being in the Union are downplayed and taken for granted, resulting in a very biased cost/benefit analysis whenever the issue is debated.

In the end, it was funnier just to see you crash out of football tournaments every now and then :)
 
Coaster Hipster said:
Whenever I feel guilty because of too much procrastination, or otherwise being very uneffective, I think of Brexit and I feel better :D Even at the highest levels of power they don't seem to know what they are doing!...

While I do have serious criticism about the EU - too much power given to the unelected Commission, the ideological emphasis on strict austerity policies, and the whole sluggish feel of it - I also think many politicians use the European Union as an easy scapegoat for their own failures. The benefits of being in the Union are downplayed and taken for granted, resulting in a very biased cost/benefit analysis whenever the issue is debated.

In the end, it was funnier just to see you crash out of football tournaments every now and then :)
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Nicely put. I see the EU as a counterweight to the Mad Max film that the Tories will turn the UK into if we let them. The EU is a fairly unsavoury capitalist megaproject, but does at least have some mild socially democratic policies that have done some good. What happened in Greece (Varoufakis being told "we can't let elections get in the way of policy") was a wake up call to the true left though, and I have been more Eurosceptic since then, albeit not remotely in a Rees-Mogg kind of way.

God I hate the Tories. At least Thatcher's still dead.
 
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Also, at least this whole mess has put the "magic of the British constitution" bull**** to rest. One of only two countries in the world (I think) to not have a codified constitution (except for the EU stuff ironically).

It's so flexible, and convention and precedent guides us seamlessly through any crisis, whilst also giving the constitution time to evolve naturally......

Wait no it's ****ed. It doesn't work AT ALL.
 
I know that this thread hasn't been updated in 6 months, but I would be intrigued to know people's opinions now that we have a new prime minister with a far more hardline pro-Brexit stance in the form of Boris Johnson and a new deadline of 31st October.

I know that I'm likely too young to give my opinion on the current situation in politics, so I apologise if I don't really have a right to comment on this topic, but I feel like I have many things I would like to say regarding Brexit and the present political climate. I apologise in advance, this could be quite long.

I must admit, the current Brexit situation really worries me. There's only 10 days until we're legally due to leave the European Union under Article 50, and there doesn't really seem to be much of a solution in sight now that votes on Boris Johnson's deal have been vetoed twice. Admittedly, I think it is now extremely likely that that deadline will be extended, but I'm really not sure what is going to happen next.

Personally, I'm very, very conflicted with regards to how to feel. Before I say anything, let me just clarify; I have never personally supported leaving the EU. I have always personally been in support of Remain, and if I was allowed to vote, I would vote to remain any day of the week. Despite my personal opinion, though, part of me agrees that we should honour the 2016 referendum result and uphold democracy; we had a vote, Leave won and we should act upon that result in some way, shape or form. It's how the British voting system has always worked and I don't see any reason to change that.

However, another part of me is in support of a new vote on Brexit, whether that is in the form of a general election or a second referendum. Even though I was only 13 when the original vote was carried out, I remember the campaigns from both sides very well. In the run up to the vote, words like "no-deal scenario" were not even an afterthought in most people's minds. The whole Brexit campaign was very positive; there was a real sense of a vision, a hope for a more idyllic Britain. All of the talk at the time made the negotiating process sound incredibly easy, and most people (myself included, despite being a Remain supporter who has been somewhat apprehensive about leaving from the start), thought that leaving the EU would be far easier than it has turned out to be. A lot has changed since the country voted to leave in 2016; as the saying goes, a week is a long time in politics, so 3 years and 4 months is practically an eternity by comparison. We now know considerably more as a nation about what Brexit will entail and how it will affect us, so part of me personally thinks that we should have some form of final say on the matter. Many people have changed their minds since the initial vote, and I think that a new vote with new knowledge would be a more accurate representation of how Britain feels about Brexit; as David Davies once said "A democracy is not a true democracy if it cannot change its mind." If the vote goes through and the country still wants to leave, then that's fine. I will accept the outcome and happily support any motive to pass the best possible version of Brexit for our country.

As I said above, I am definitely very conflicted with regards to how I feel (despite the fact that my paragraph arguing for a second referendum is considerably longer than my paragraph arguing against!), but one thing is for certain; I am confident that we will eventually find a resolution to the present impasse in Parliament. I think it will be a game of patience, but I think things will work out sooner rather than later. However, I think that we need to be very careful what we do now, because the effects of the things we do now could have consequences lasting years, potentially even decades.
 
Matt N said:
we should honour the 2016 referendum result and uphold democracy; we had a vote, Leave won and we should act upon that result in some way, shape or form. It's how the British voting system has always worked and I don't see any reason to change that.
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It's important to remember how Leave actually won though. Dominic Cummings himself admitted that in the run-up to the referendum all the signals were that Leave were going to lose. He also admitted that their own research showed that the single thing that managed to get Leave over the finish line was...that big red bus. Which claimed that the UK sent £350m a week to the EU and that we should "fund our NHS instead".

It was all a massive lie though. The £350m figure was nowhere near correct. And even if it were, the government clearly had no intention of passing on all that money to the NHS. A couple of days after the referendum, the £350m/NHS promise was quietly deleted from the Leave website.

For undecided voters, this promise of a massive cash injection for the NHS was sufficient for them to vote Leave - in sufficient numbers for Leave to win.

I think there's an argument to be made that a second referendum would be a fair response to the Leave campaign deliberately misleading the British public. After all, nobody would fall for the same ruse twice, surely?

Oh, wait...
 
The 2016 referendum was fundamentally flawed on the basis that "Leave" is an exceptionally vague term when it comes to the EU. It was clearly assumed that Remain would win and not enough consideration was given to what would happen if Leave won. This is made clear by statements like "Brexit means Brexit" and the 3+ years of arguing about how we should leave.

My preferred analogy is that it is the equivalent of voting whether or not to have a takeaway and then arguing if people meant they wanted a curry, a pizza or fish and chips.

The only sensible solution since May's deal got voted down and it became clear that Parliament could not agree on a course forward, is to have a second referendum. To be clear however it would not make any sense to essentially rerun the 2016 referendum, that would be undemocratic (and wouldn't actually solve anything). There should be a vote based on the 3 available options - leave with the negotiated deal, leave with no deal, or revoke Article 50 and remain.

The ballot paper in such a vote should have you choose your first and second choice out of the three options. Then when the votes are counted the option with the least votes is eliminated and those votes go to their second choices, leaving you with one option with a majority that can be immediately implemented.

After that there should be a general election.

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The way that all sides in parliament have behaved for the last three years has been little short of embarrassing.
 
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