Brexit discussion thread II

steddyeddy wrote: »

It's amazing they barely teach this stuff at school. This has come back to bite them.

Actually, they do teach this stuff in schools in the UK. Post-colonial guilt has become a big thing in the UK.

That's a clear difference between the Japanese view of history, where mass rape and murder in Nanking can be reinterpreted as "a few bad apples" and native women offering their services as "comfort women".
In the last 15 years in France and Russia, there has been official government effort to try and portray their colonial past in a more positive light.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/15/highereducation.artsandhumanities
This wouldn't be acceptable in modern Britain.

donaghs wrote: »

Actually, they do teach this stuff in schools in the UK. Post-colonial guilt has become a big thing in the UK.

That's a clear difference between the Japanese view of history, where mass rape and murder in Nanking can be reinterpreted as "a few bad apples" and native women offering their services as "comfort women".
In the last 15 years in France and Russia, there has been official government effort to try and portray their colonial past in a more positive light.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/15/highereducation.artsandhumanities
This wouldn't be acceptable in modern Britain.

Could you provide some links to that affect? I'm going to have to disagree with you there. I work in England and the ignorance regarding colonial history in Ireland/India is evident. I work with guys from Oxford in Cambridge who were taught that the partition of Ireland and India was a good thing. Only now on the 70th anniversary of Indian partition are they questioning the morality involved. Nor do they seem to have a clue about Irish colonial history such as the famine, penal laws and discrimination against Catholics. If there's colonial guilt I'd love to see it.

I know plenty of people who studied A level history who said they didn't study colonial history.

solodeogloria wrote: »

Good morning!

It's worth pointing out that the Penal Laws affected the whole United Kingdom and were also discriminatory towards non-conformists such as Presbyterians or Puritans. These discriminatory laws weren't primarily targeted at Ireland but rather to ensure that all subjects in the United Kingdom were united under the national faith of the monarch.

This was obviously wrong but it's important to explain this. Partition of countries is obviously more grey than black or white. The partition of Ireland was a result of not wishing to discriminate against northern Protestants (including the Presbyterians who would have been discriminated against previously) who wished to be a part of the United Kingdom.

The partition of India was also to address religious divisions and tensions respect to Islam and Hinduism primarily.

I can see the argument as to why partition was a good thing. I think this isn't ignorance but rather a difference of opinion (I think missing this distinction explains much of your posting style on this thread for the record).

We probably should take this in the history forum

Much thanks,
solodeogloria

Ah not quite. My mistake calling the Penal laws as such. I should have referred to them as popery laws.

It is true that restrictions (like the Clarendon Code) imposed on Catholics in England, Scotland and Wales also applied to Catholics in Ireland. But Irish Catholics were subject to an additional, comprehensive system of penal laws that reduced them to helotry and illiteracy in their own land. The Irish penal laws were inaugurated in the late 17th century and not finally removed until 1829 (though the worst of them had been repealed by the mid-1790s).

Laws like the Clarendon Code (which mainly barred Catholics from public office) were only the beginning of it where Ireland was concerned. In England, Wales, and Scotland the vast majority of the people adhered to the established churches. The penal laws affected only a minority, and their purpose was to ensure that that minority (perceived as potentially seditious) was excluded from power.

In Ireland, on the other hand, where close to 90 percent of the population was Catholic, the point of the penal laws was to render the majority so powerless in every respect—economically and culturally as well as politically—that they could never threaten the ruling elite.

Consequently, the penal laws that applied in Ireland from the 1690s onward were much more comprehensive than their equivalents in the other two kingdoms. They had the effect, over a few generations, of reducing the Irish Catholics to poverty and illiteracy. They also provided incentives for Catholics to convert to Protestantism. Some of the key provisions included:

Catholics could not purchase land (and most of them had been dispossessed of their holdings in the aftermath of the Cromwellian and Williamite wars of the 17th century). Further, Catholics could not lease land for a period of more than 31 years.
Catholics were required to practice gavelkind, a system of inheritance whereby a deceased person's land is divided equally among all male heirs. Therefore, Catholics’ leased landholdings became successively smaller and poorer with each passing generation (leading Catholic peasants to become dependent on potato monoculture, which had catastrophic effects in the 1840s).
Protestants, on the other hand, practiced primogeniture so that holdings remained intact over time. But if one son of a Catholic family converted to Anglicanism, he inherited all the family land and his brothers got nothing.
Even if sons of a Catholic family were inclined to (illegally) forgo their inheritance so that one son could inherit and keep the land intact, there were few other options available. Many occupations, including the professions and the officer ranks of the army were closed to Catholics.
Catholics were severely restricted in their access to education. At the primary or secondary levels, Catholic schoolmasters or clerics were banned from teaching. (This gave rise to the hedge schools, illegal schools in the fields or hedgerows taught by itinerant schoolmasters.) Catholics were of course barred from Trinity College, the country’s only university. Many Catholic families, if they could afford it, sent sons abroad (usually to France or Spain) to be educated. But … you guessed it, that became illegal too.
The Irish cavalry had performed well in the wars of the 17th century. Well, that was not going to happen again: no Catholic was allowed to own a horse worth more than £5. Besides, Catholics were not permitted to own or bear arms.
There were also severe restrictions on the practice of the Catholic religion, which became essentially a furtive, private affair.
Dissenters (which, in the Irish context, largely meant Presbyterians) were subject to some restrictions, mainly with respect to participating in politics and in the public practice of their faith. But the full panoply of the penal laws applied only to the Catholics in Ireland.

The specifically Irish penal laws were enacted by the Irish Parliament, an institution for which only members of the established (Anglican) Church of Ireland could vote and in which only members of that Church could sit—a minority within a minority (known as the “Ascendancy”). These men looked with fear and a certain horror at the ragged Catholic masses. As they saw it, the Papists were down and it was the Ascendancy’s job to keep them down.

The Dublin Parliament did not have the last word, however. Its acts had to be ratified by the Parliament in London. That was a good thing, because some measures that made it out of College Green proved too strong for the MPs at Westminster—one striking example being the law passed in Dublin requiring that any Catholic priests found in Ireland be castrated.

Right I'm posing a question. Is it possible that the negotiating team is deliberately stalling negotiations so that they don't get a deal and they tell the British public that Brexit isn't viable? Just a thought. If not on the negotiating team's initiative May could have sent the worst possible team to ensure Brexit doesn't look like a good idea.

steddyeddy wrote: »

Right I'm posing a question. Is it possible that the negotiating team is deliberately stalling negotiations so that they don't get a deal and they tell the British public that Brexit isn't viable? Just a thought. If not on the negotiating team's initiative May could have sent the worst possible team to ensure Brexit doesn't look like a good idea.

That would be self sacrifice of May and her team, what would be a fine move of them, but overall I think they want to stay in power as long as possible. IMO pulling the plug on Brexit, means re-election and Corbyn in power.

steddyeddy wrote: »

Is it possible that the negotiating team is deliberately stalling negotiations so that they don't get a deal and they tell the British public that Brexit isn't viable?

No.

But it is possible that they decided on a hard brexit early on, and the negotiations are just a show intended to shift the blame onto the EU.

Sending hard Brexiteer David Davis to negotiate with the EU (or, apparently, just to argue with them) may have been a signal that this was the situation.

https://twitter.com/mrdavidwhitley/status/903562507780050944

Fratton Fred wrote: »

The two sides of the negotiation are coming from different perspectives as well.

To relate it to the oft mentioned party unity that is hindering the British side, the eu side has no other considerations other than party unity (the party in this case, being the eu.)

When the deadline gets closer, we will also see more frustration creep in from other parties, such as individual country premiers, or industry groups who need practical, not political, resolutions. At this point, I would expect the talks to move up a notch, rather than the general show boating we have seen so far.

Unlike the UK, there is one thing the EU are united on - the UK can't get a good deal so that others might leave.

The UK keeps forgetting this.