[canucklad]

@ Globalti – 30/06/2016 09:39 BST
This is an interesting “take” on the mess. I think there’s a strong possibilty that the writer is correct and that no successor to Cameron will have the balls to press the button:

I’d reframe the question , and ask ………
What politician has the balls NOT to press the button?
The simple fact is, that if Article 50 isn’t invoked you’d be as well as to close the Houses of Parliament down and set up a quasi EU state, with us being HK and the EU being China.
Regardless of your opinions on the matter, our country (UK) is based on sound democratic principles.
The majority instructed their elected parliamentarians to remove ourselves from the EU. For the political elite to summarily plot a back track is risking alienating even further a huge swath of our fellow citizens and possibly plunging us into an irreversible slide into anarchy.

And who’d want to invest in UK PLC then ?

[AnthonyDunn]

@canucklad – 30/06/2016 15:55 BST

The UK was variously lied to, conned and duped regarding the EU for decades now, not just recently. No great surprise that there was a rich vein of Europhobia to tap into. But the EU was never any PR China and the European Commission and the Council of Ministers has never been any Chinese Communist Party and its leadership. Those who have claimed this demonstrate (a) their ignorance and (b) their tendency towards ridiculous hyperbole. They are the same kind of people who view the United Nations as a proto global government.

What one can say is that whilst the vote was not to stay in the EU, it was not to come out of the Single European Market. Which is the central conundrum for the Brexit team: jobs and incomes or “take back control over our borders…” and cut/eliminate immigration/deport the foreigners etc. Either way, the Brexiters will either let down the anti-foreigner nativists or they will let down the entire country.

The only hope right now is that after her unbelievably stupid decision last year to permit some 1 million Syrian and other refugees into Germany, Angela Merkel now agrees to some kind of reworking of the fourth freedom concerning the free movement of peoples. This game is nowhere played out.

[canucklad]

AD my Chinese analogy is possibly stretching the comparison a bit far, but I’ll stand my my assertion that the referendum Bill that was passed by parliament was not a consultative referendum seeking our opinions.
It was a high risk gamble asking us for a specific instruction to mandate Parliament to fulfil the wishes of the majority.

Westminster giveith ,Westminster taketh away…..At their peril.

[PeterCoultas]

AnthonyD: My point was based on the fact that there are spreads of ability & attainment in all societies & that it is also not in any societies interest to leave their poorest quality people without hope & the possibility of useful contribution. We suck in (for various and obvious reasons) people from other countries who can outcompete our less well endowed citizens and this is not entirely beneficial.

[BigDog.]

Canucklad
Actually your Chinese analogy wasn’t stretching. They run a similar politburo agenda setting as the EU.

Take a look at the Conservative MEP manifesto and note how this differs from a UK Parliamentary Party manifesto.

https://www.conservatives.com%2Feurope%2F~%2Fmedia%2FFiles%2FDownloadable%2520Files%2FMANIFESTO%25202014%2FLarge%2520Print%2520Euro%2520Manifesto_English.ashx&usg=AFQjCNHAYOriMNWWUvTAEkgLVh7jkfCUlQ

The MEP 2014 manifesto basically listed things to put a brake on EU legislation, not setting the legislation but trying to get opt outs specifically –

An in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU
z More powers back to Britain
z A better deal for British taxpayers
z Continued control of our borders and a crackdown on bene? t tourism
z More control of justice and home affairs
z More trade and continued economic independence – by saying no to the Euro and ‘ever closer union’

I would also ignore the hyperbole of AD – he has questioned the intelligence various posters who do not hold his somewhat dogmatic views. Yet he is blind to the equally guilty spin, mendacity and lies of Remain campaign.
His preferred party Libdems started early (2014) spreading misinformation in favour of the EU and Remain, (though went under the radar as they were subsequently decimated in 2015)

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/janice-atkinson/european-elections-liberal-democrats_b_4530668.html

(Note the last line … Over to you Liberal Democrats, oh and Labour and Conservatives too, please justify your misinformation…)

Most postgraduate degrees inculcate an enduring strong discipline of eengaging fact based academic rigor backed by defined proven research methodologies. Yet for some, this discipline has been ignored or forgotten, replaced by visceral hyperbole, bluster, specious claims, obscure blogs and intellectual bullying – AD should have been better than that.

The EU is undemocratic – one case in point was the Treaty of Lisbon, a central element of which was designed to transfer further power away from national governments to the Supranational EU. We didn’t get to vote however the French and Dutch populace did and voted by 55% and 62% respectively against. The way around this “wrong answer” was to amend existing treaties instead which did not require a second referendum in France or Netherlands. However ratification of the amendments was required in Ireland who rejected it! The EU instructed Ireland to go back and think again, telling them to re-run the referendum!

edit : An embarrassed Gordon Brown was conveniently absent from the eventual group celebratory photo-call.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7141279.stm

[alainboy56]

BigDog

In the words of Dick Emery …….. “Oh I do like you”
Splendid post. How can any pro REMAINERS on here argue with those facts especially the last paragraph. it reminds me of the election in Palestine some years ago, where they voted for HAMAS against Al Fattah, The USA were boasting on and on about how democracy was coming to Palestine and then when the people voted the ‘wrong’ way, USA ignored it and still, in a very low way, supported Abu Mazen and Al Fattah! But of course, not that much to upset that horrible little state next door that occupies their land, and that ignores almost all UN resolutions and carries on regardless, precisely and exactly because it has the support of the big boys across the pond.
In the words of another comedian, this time Ronnie Corbett -“Anyway where was I? I digress”
Democracy my friend – it depends on what viewpoint one takes on it, and which way the enforcers of said democracy want it to flow.
Such is life unfortunately, in this messed up world we live in today.

[SimonS1]

That wasn’t the Dick Emery catchphrase either 😉

[alainboy56]

SimonS1
Yes I do know it was “ooh you are awful, but I do like you” —but I paraphrased it, as many people here are not from UK – stop being so negative all the time. Cheer up.

[canucklad]

It’s Friday, and a frantic Friday for me, so before I’m dragged into the frenzy here’s a Friday joke…

A man walks up to a fancy dress ball, completely naked except for a piece of sand paper covering his meat and 2 veg…..
He’s stopped and asked who’s he’s meant to be?
He replies ……………”Dick Emery”

[Bath_VIP]

Well if it’s joke time then here’s one that apparently has done the rounds but I haven’t seen it before. With Britain leaving the EU, this plan is no longer necessary.

——————–

The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty’s Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).

In the first year, “s” will be used instead of the soft “c.” Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard “c” will be replaced with “k”. Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced by “f”. This will make words like fotograf” 20 persent shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent “e”s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.

By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” by “z” and “w” by ” v”.

During ze fifz year, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou”, and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.

Ze drem vil finali kum tru.

[Carajillo2Sugar]

Bath_VIP – zehr gut, mein Herr!

I hear the French Govt are already calling for english to no longer be the preferred language of the EU. It has always rankled them that english overtook their beloved francais in the EU linguistic stakes.

(Bloody foreigners, comin’ over ‘ere, speakin’ our langwidge better than wot we do…..)

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

[BigDog.]

-If the EU applied to join the EU it would not be admitted – on the grounds that it does not meet its own standards for democracy (Historian Timothy Garton Ash)

A farmer named Sam was overseeing his animals in a remote hilly pasture in Hereford when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a man in a Brioni® suit, Gucci® shoes, RayBan® sunglasses and YSL® tie, leaned out the window and asked the farmer, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?”
Sam looks at the man, then looks at his peacefully grazing animals and calmly answers, “Sure, why not?”
The suit parks his car, whips out his Dell® notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3® cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop® and exports it
to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany …
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot® that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL® Database through an ODBC connected Excel® spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry® and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-colour, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet® printer, turns to the Farmer and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”
“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Sam.
He watches the suit select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the suit stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Sam says to the suit, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”
The suit thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?” “You’re an EU bureaucrat”, says Sam.
“Wow! That’s correct,” says the suit, “but how did you guess that?”
“No guessing required.” answered Sam. “You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of pounds worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter -this is a flock of sheep!
Now give me back my dog.

– A Scotsman, Englishman and Irishman went into a bar; they all had to leave as the Englishman wanted to.

– An ex prime minister and ex leader of the opposition walk into a job centre…

– I only supported Iceland because I didn’t know what it meant, I didn’t think they would win.

[AnthonyDunn]

@BigDog. – 01/07/2016 11:15 BST

The only point being that all farm subsidies and CAP programmes were implemented at a country level by the Farming/Food/Rural Affairs ministry of whichever country. So no Eurocrats with fancy gear… Ever.

But after decades of BoTox’s myth and muck spreading around the EU and his fantasy of straight bananas, I guess that the next time there is a plague of locusts, meteor shower or unseasonal weather, that too will all have been the fault of the EU to the shoulder-chipped grievance pedlars.

Those of us in the “48” are not about to go away and in the UK’s Ruritanian-style democracy, we still have a right to be heard. Just as were Eurosceptics across the decades:

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2016/07/01/letter-remain-voter/

For some light relief from the reality of a country voting to stick its head up its own rear end, a reworking of that scene from “Downfall”:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/boris-johnson-downfall-hitler-video-meme-eu-referendum-bunker_uk_57737efce4b081f48abaa055?edition=uk&utm_hp_ref=uk

[transtraxman]

I might have missed some comments over the last few days but what I have seen does not illustrate some important points.

Firstly,
The European Union is us – still. It is what we have made it. The Nation States forming the union decided that they would decide who controled the instititutions, meaning them. The lack of democratic process is due to the Nation States, not the EU. That has now slipped out of their hands, boomeranged and hit them in the face. Thus it has become a bureaucratic dictatorship which needs radical reform. This is especially needful with the increase of membership which it has experienced and could well in the future.

Secondly,
We can stay or leave. The ways can be various. Though not legally binding, the referendum gave the governing bodies a strong opinion which cannot be ignored.
Quite frankly, the fact that the convening body/person refuses to take his decision to its logical conclusion and washes his hands of the whole affair leaves everything up in the air.

Pontius “call me Dave” Pilate has left everything in the hands of his successor. That means his successor has no mandate except for a large opinion poll. For me that means a general election and another referendum. If the result is the same then there can be no question. Out is out and that is that.

However, if another referendum changes the result then everything is up for change, or not. The whole question will evolve round the position of the MPs up for reelection and their opposing candidates. Parliament, not referenda, changes laws so make this a clear decision. They are our representatives not delegates. A new Parliament voted in with a clear mandate supported by a second referendum is what we need – nothing less. The decision is far too important to leave in the hands of opinion polls and propagandic media empires.

[CathayLoyalist2]

transtraxman, I agree with you on the Dictatorship. I would add the apathy shown amongst the European electorate only fueled the ‘dictatorship fire’. However I don’t believe there is any need for another general election. People vote for a party and a manifesto and then maybe a Prime Minister. Second with the last GE only 15 months ago the time now is for firm direction. Another referendum absolutely not. Done and dusted so let’s move forward something a number of politician and business leaders should focus on .That said I would question whether some are leaders given the whining and moaning. If Theresa May is elected as Tory leader she has already ruled out a second referendum.

[Author]

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