Current Affairs EU In or Out

[abelard]

Very sad the amount of people who want an end to free movement. So regressive.

Absolutely.

But it catches on, everywhere, every time, because it is so easy to place immigration at the centre of a story that makes sense to people.

Wages stagnant? Public services deteriorating by the day? Housing comically unaffordable? Life increasingly subject to the unpredictable whims of a distant, uncaring bureaucracy? Your tastes and your choices and your customs mocked by a sneering elite?

This is now the every day experience for many if not most people in the country, and it is the deliberate result of a state campaign to enrich people who already hold assets without them having to earn it the conventional way by doing something productive with their money.

The explanation that there are 'too many people' checks all these boxes, which is why cynics like May or charlatans like Farage resort to it so reliably.

If we want to preserve Freedom of Movement, or membership of the European Union, or perhaps even civil society as we know it, then we need to start offering a better story, and we need to start coming up with ways to make people once again feel on a visceral, emotional level that the system isn't rigged against them, and that they can exert meaningful control over their own lives.

If we don't start taking this much more seriously, and soon, then the Farages of the world and worse will continue to eat our lunch and piss on the furniture.

But instead, our most vocal champions of Freedom of Movement reject out of hand the notion that ordinary people should see themselves represented in government; or that austerity should be condemned, apologised for and reversed immediately; or that the conditions of those who don't hold property should be improved at the expense of those who do.

For nearly ten years now, they have ignored the findings of every reputable macroeconomic expert, with an ignorance and delusion to best even the most turgid Brexiteer, and rammed through a radical and demonstrably failed ideological experiment, whether out of naivety, ideological zealotry, or just crude self-interest.

And even now, they remain genuinely unable to comprehend why nobody in Wigan trusts their statistics or Oxbridge papers or TV pundits or think tank reports on Brexit this time around either.

Political trust and political legitimacy are fragile: easy to break, and exceedingly difficult to repair. We went all in on the cuts, and now the bill has come due.

Brexit and the anti-immigrant passions that fueled it are the children of austerity - the lineage couldn't be clearer, though the father still can't bear to look his children in the eye.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

I posted this in the climate thread as well, but it seems especially relevant here, given the way expert opinions are so airily dismissed whenever they counter the poster's point of view.

“We have to insist on an understanding that there are people who understand areas better than we do,” she added. “I don’t pretend to be an engineer. I don’t pretend to be a physicist. If the physicists at MIT tell me that they’ve figured out gravitational waves, I’m going to trust them more than I’m going to trust myself to imagine whether or not there are gravitational waves.”

The decline of trust in science "terrifies" former MIT president Susan Hockfield

If we don’t trust scientists to be experts in their fields, Hockfield says on the latest episode of Recode Decode, "we have no way of making it into the future."

www.vox.com

It's from an interview with former MIT president Susan Hockfield, and mainly talks about climate change, but it's equally important for expertise in general I think.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

No doubt this will be dismissed because of who is saying it, but it's pretty hard to dispute what he's actually saying.

 

[tonyhorne]

No doubt this will be dismissed because of who is saying it, but it's pretty hard to dispute what he's actually saying.

Wow! Two Tories in agreement with each other.

Something of a collectors item...

 

[The binman chronicles]

No doubt this will be dismissed because of who is saying it, but it's pretty hard to dispute what he's actually saying.

People hate him but he almost always talks sense. ...Or at least way more sense than any currently serving MP.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Wow! Two Tories in agreement with each other.

Something of a collectors item...

Who's the Tory in this scenario?

 

[abelard]

People hate him but he almost always talks sense

Is what it says on the business cards that Blair gives to climate change despots who boil their political opponents alive

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/tony-blairs-5m-deal-to-advise-kazakh-dictator/

the medium is the message, @Bruce Wayne

 

[Khalekan]

No doubt this will be dismissed because of who is saying it, but it's pretty hard to dispute what he's actually saying.

Ireland is a perfect illustration of Mr. Blair’s point.

That country is facing chaos due to the fact the English Brexiteers gave zero thought and display even less concern over the implications Brexit will have due to the border we imposed over there.

They would just press on with Brexit and to heck with the people living on the island of Ireland, whom have demonstrated on both sides of the border that they are hugely in favour of staying in the EU

But because of Ireland’s alliance with the European Union, it will not and cannot be bullied by a neighbour which was able to do just that for centuries.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

Is what it says on the business cards that Blair gives to climate change despots who boil their political opponents alive

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/23/tony-blairs-5m-deal-to-advise-kazakh-dictator/

the medium is the message, @Bruce Wayne

The bloke doesn't need to be perfect to make sense now and then. Obviously Jezzer has no blemishes, but I suspect most politicians have numerous skeletons in the closet.

 

[tsubaki]

No doubt this will be dismissed because of who is saying it, but it's pretty hard to dispute what he's actually saying.

The problem with what he is saying is that there is a fairly large disconnect with what he actually did, or what he actually means.

The EU could be a great state if it was properly and democratically unified - ie: had a single military, a single foreign policy, single taxation policy, had the same laws across the continent and was making steps towards getting everyone to be able to talk to one another - and it would also have a much better strategic situation than the US, India or China because we have no borders with any of them, no real defined geographical boundaries (in the way that the North American continent is for the US, and the Himalaya are for China and India) and the states that are on our borders are mostly corrupt or failing regimes that one might expect would gradually be absorbed by a multinational, multiethnic free and democratic nation state that had a higher standard of living than they did. Make a success of the EU, improve the lives of its citizens and it isn't that hard to imagine an EU which in 30 or 40 years could run from Cadiz to the Bering Strait, from Rekjavik to the Sahara and which had turned the Mediterranean into a private lake (again).

It would be a vast improvement on what we have now, would improve the lives of hundreds of millions and because of the damage that Trump is doing to the US we might well find ourselves being top dog within a decade or so even without further expansion.

What Blair wants however is a continuation of the largely failed status quo, in which his ilk get to enjoy all the benefits of European integration whilst also preserving their own power and status at home, and a continuation of the US-UK "alliance" which demands that the EU must not get into a position of rivalry with the US (and just to be clear, a unified EU would be the biggest and most effective rival the US has ever faced). It is this clinging to the comfort blanket of nationalism by centrists, for their own gain, that is causing the damage, and it must be stopped.

 

[Barnfred 55]

Ireland is a perfect illustration of Mr. Blair’s point.

That country is facing chaos due to the fact the English Brexiteers gave zero thought and display even less concern over the implications Brexit will have due to the border we imposed over there.

They would just press on with Brexit and to heck with the people living on the island of Ireland, whom have demonstrated on both sides of the border that they are hugely in favour of staying in the EU

But because of Ireland’s alliance with the European Union, it will not and cannot be bullied by a neighbour which was able to do just that for centuries.

Irrespective of the outcome of Brexit, I think one of the things that has come out of the whole Brexit process is just how fragile the UK union is. If the people of the UK have been given the chance to vote on membership of the EU, maybe the people of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales should also be given the opportunity to vote on membership of the UK.

I know it's something that the SNP are very vocal about anyway. Have the Irish or Welsh ever had a vote on leaving the UK?. Is there much demand within the Republic of Ireland for a united country or would Northern Ireland need to go it alone as an independent state if the majority voted to leave?.

 

[Bruce Wayne]

The problem with what he is saying is that there is a fairly large disconnect with what he actually did, or what he actually means.

The EU could be a great state if it was properly and democratically unified - ie: had a single military, a single foreign policy, single taxation policy, had the same laws across the continent and was making steps towards getting everyone to be able to talk to one another - and it would also have a much better strategic situation than the US, India or China because we have no borders with any of them, no real defined geographical boundaries (in the way that the North American continent is for the US, and the Himalaya are for China and India) and the states that are on our borders are mostly corrupt or failing regimes that one might expect would gradually be absorbed by a multinational, multiethnic free and democratic nation state that had a higher standard of living than they did. Make a success of the EU, improve the lives of its citizens and it isn't that hard to imagine an EU which in 30 or 40 years could run from Cadiz to the Bering Strait, from Rekjavik to the Sahara and which had turned the Mediterranean into a private lake (again).

It would be a vast improvement on what we have now, would improve the lives of hundreds of millions and because of the damage that Trump is doing to the US we might well find ourselves being top dog within a decade or so even without further expansion.

What Blair wants however is a continuation of the largely failed status quo, in which his ilk get to enjoy all the benefits of European integration whilst also preserving their own power and status at home, and a continuation of the US-UK "alliance" which demands that the EU must not get into a position of rivalry with the US (and just to be clear, a unified EU would be the biggest and most effective rival the US has ever faced). It is this clinging to the comfort blanket of nationalism by centrists, for their own gain, that is causing the damage, and it must be stopped.

As we've seen though greater political integration is a difficult one to sell domestically.

 

[tsubaki]

As we've seen though greater political integration is a difficult one to sell domestically.

It has never been on offer, though - certainly not here.

How many politicians across Europe have ever stood on a platform that describes how the EU should look in 20, 30 years time (apart from the "we should ditch this" traitors)?

 

[tsubaki]

Irrespective of the outcome of Brexit, I think one of the things that has come out of the whole Brexit process is just how fragile the UK union is. If the people of the UK have been given the chance to vote on membership of the EU, maybe the people of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales should also be given the opportunity to vote on membership of the UK.

I know it's something that the SNP are very vocal about anyway. Have the Irish or Welsh ever had a vote on leaving the UK?. Is there much demand within the Republic of Ireland for a united country or would Northern Ireland need to go it alone as an independent state if the majority voted to leave?.

Scotland and NI can do what they like, but the "Welsh" - British, really - have more right to the rest of the country than the English do.

 

[Bruce Wayne]