swiwi_ wrote: » Don't think this forum should be preachy given Ireland had 2 goes at each of the Lisbon treaties IIRC. The moral high ground is barely more than a mound.
Neil3030 wrote: » If the will of the people is a certain way, you can have 100 referenda, it won't change the outcome. Have 100 referenda on introducing the death penalty, for example, and you'll see it beaten every time. BUT, if the will of the people is unreliable, transient and easily manipulated, and if the issue is complex, I have no logical or moral opposition to several referenda being carried out. If one study says a drug works you don't just dust your hands and assume it will always work, you carry out follow up confirmation studies to make sure.
Neil3030 wrote: » There was only one Lisbon treaty. We rejected Nice and Lisbon, once each.
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » There were 2 Lisbon treaty referendums. We rejected the first one and passed the second one, which we had renegotiated some of the terms.
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » Leaving aside the reasons that the public voted to leave... I genuinely don't see why some people in positions of power were campaigning so strongly to leave.
mfceiling wrote: » And there in lies the problem for a lot of people. Have a referendum and you don't get the result...hold it again til you get what you want. A lot of the brits were sick of the nonsense from Europe and wanted more controls over their own administration. You looked at Germany opening up their arms to welcome refugees and then panic a few weeks later when huge numbers arrived and they wondered how they could care for them. In the Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago there was a story from an Iraqi refugee who was returning to Iraq because he felt the food in Germany was poor and he was disappointed with his accommodation. These stories just stoked the fire for the leave campaign. What happens if they do hold the referendum again and they get the same result? Keep holding til they vote to remain in?
Ireland had 2 goes at each of the Lisbon treaties IIRC
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » The thing I don't get though is why were these politicians and other people deliberately misleading the people? I genuinely don't get what the benefits are for them to leave the EU. Leave people have already admitted there probably won't be any change in immigration numbers, trade agreements aren't as clear cut as they implied they would be, Scotland are kicking off, the Northern Ireland issue is very messy, the Torys and Labour are imploding off the back of the result, not to mention the list of projects, local and nationwide, that will now have EU funding cut. Leaving aside the reasons that the public voted to leave... I genuinely don't see why some people in positions of power were campaigning so strongly to leave.
Neil3030 wrote: » Well for some politicians like Hannan, they have always branded themselves as eurosceptic and now was their time to shine. For Boris Johnson, this was a straight shoot at the Tory throne. For Farage, see Hannan, but with a primary motivation to establish himself as a leading populist figure, and UKIP as a serious player in UK politics. For Labour members supporting Leave there are probably a few reasons - undermine Corbyn on the one hand, but also establish support amongst the core of Labour voters around the North who really only vote Labour because they aren't the Tories, but otherwise hold none of Labour's social values - the kind of people UKIP have been appealing to. It's an area Labour critically need to deal with, and perhaps a subsection of the party think this would be good way to win them back. Politics is predominantly a game for careerist sociopaths so a bunch of them conning the general public into potentially jeapordising their future is not the least bit surprising.
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » I was reading there about a town in Wales that has almost no immigration and is funded to a huge degree by the EU and they voted to leave. It just makes no sense to me how these people rationalise their decision?
Ian Duncan Smith is now saying that the promises they made were actually more like a list of possibilities. How people are still fooled by these guys is beyond me.
Neil3030 wrote: » Yup. It is dispiriting how easily people get conned, but in a land of 60+ million people you are going to get some very very convincing sociopaths.
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » Not sure who he was talking to on this one, but wow....https://twitter.com/PED7/status/747063871765086208 I don't know why they're surprised at the SNP being the most organised. The night the Scottish referendum results were coming in the experts were already saying that the only way there'd be another Independence referendum would be if Cameron gave the UK the EU referendum, which was already an almost certainty at that point. The SNP have probably had this sorted out and sitting ready a year ago.
irishbucsfan wrote: » That's, frankly, a thick question. The only people who have any power to enact a plan are the government. The media have been depressingly useless over the past couple of days in their rush to generate as much content as they can out of the voids that have appeared in the leadership of the two major British parties.
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » What's a thick question?
irishbucsfan wrote: » Asking anyone outside the government "what's the plan".
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » Maybe I missed it but I can't hear who they were asking it to. The government was being led by a man who didn't want to leave, and his party seems very much split on it. Surely those who wanted to leave should be the ones with a plan, Johnson and Gove, for example?
irishbucsfan wrote: » What are you looking for exactly? What would such a plan consist of?
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » Well, when are they going to actually pull out, for starters. Who/where/when will negotiations regarding trade deals take place, have they already got provisional deals in the works? What's happening with Northern Ireland and the land border with the EU? How are they going to replace all the funding that the EU currently gives to various projects, payments to farmers, research grants etc. Even a vague timeline for these some of these things would be better than saying they've nothing at all.
irishbucsfan wrote: » Every single one of these things are up to the government. Noone on the other side have any control over any of those things. So unless you're asking the prime minister or a very senior government minister, it's a completely pointless question. At the moment it looks like the government didn't have a plan, but then they were mostly all in favour of the remaining in the EU. So it's not a remotely surprising answer to the question despite Sky's usual standards of commentary making it seem otherwise. In reality the only real variable that could make a difference right now would be the outgoing PM activating article 50 on his way out.
TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » Johnson and Gove were both eyeing up Cameron's job. It seems completely ludicrous that they don't have any kind of plan. Whether they were in a position to implement it or not is nearly irrelevant. Did they actually think Cameron was going to stay where he was and negotiate an exit he didn't want? The fact that nobody thought to ask who had a plan before the vote is ridiculous too. How can people make these decisions, or ask the public to make these decisions, with no long term plan in place?
irishbucsfan wrote: » TICKLE_ME_ELMO wrote: » Johnson and Gove were both eyeing up Cameron's job. It seems completely ludicrous that they don't have any kind of plan. Whether they were in a position to implement it or not is nearly irrelevant. Did they actually think Cameron was going to stay where he was and negotiate an exit he didn't want? The fact that nobody thought to ask who had a plan before the vote is ridiculous too. How can people make these decisions, or ask the public to make these decisions, with no long term plan in place? Don't they? Seems like you're getting ahead of yourself there a little bit.
irishbucsfan wrote: » Don't they? Seems like you're getting ahead of yourself there a little bit.
molloyjh wrote: » I think the problem here is around what exactly the Leave campaign were actually campaigning for. The selling points for a Leave vote should have consisted of a list of things that were going to happen as a result of the Leave vote. What was going to happen to trade, how was immigration going to be managed. Now it's certainly true that the Government should have had a plan for the Leave outcome, but exactly how do they form this plan? What exactly have the people in the UK voted for? We know what they've voted against, but do we know exactly what they want? Do they want to cut all ties with the EU and forego the free trade agreement etc? The Leave campaign should have had an alternative for people to vote for. They haven't. I think the point the commentator was making was that the Leave campaign should have had a desired outcome and the Government should have had a plan. Both came up with neither which is why he pointed to Sturgeon as the guy who has thought this through the most.
