EU Elections

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cbe
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Re: EU Elections

Postby cbe » Thu May 30, 2019 12:02 pm

Should that day ever come about Richard - find somewhere to hide - the outrage will be such that the yellow vest stuff in France will appear tame. I can assume only that you have not come across the mounting anger of those who are being ignored.

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Richard
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Re: EU Elections

Postby Richard » Thu May 30, 2019 8:12 pm

The referendum was presented without any regard to the legislation required to carry it out.
Legislation was not even in place.
In that sense, I agree, people may well feel angry if they see that it is not so simple after all.
But nobody should have been led to believe in voting for a Brexit without realising that the devil is in the detail.
That's the slovenly way in which these Acts are always drawn, as popular party-political devices without thinking things through.
Legislation has to go through Parliament, as always and stand the test of all members voting for or against it - that is democracy. A snap referendum was never going to be possible to implement without due process. That is how all legislation goes through Parliament.
The population at large were misled into believing in a quick and easy result if they 'won' the vote in their favour.
If that is the great disconnect between ordinary people and MP's then perhaps people need educating.

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seahermit
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Re: EU Elections

Postby seahermit » Fri May 31, 2019 12:20 am

I'm sorry but that is all rubbish! Nobody pretended or believed that implementing the verdict of the refendum would be a simple, quick process which would happen a few weeks later ... Of course untangling all our trading and other links with the EU was going to take a period of time. For a start, as you infer, the government led by David Cameron was taken completely by surprise by the result and had made no preparations for it.

But they have had almost THREE YEARS to sort it out. The failure to actually implement Brexit is what has caused immense anger and frustration and that is the nub of the problem. Nothing else.

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Richard
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Re: EU Elections

Postby Richard » Fri May 31, 2019 3:13 pm

Back in 2016, the government said that Brexit is going to take 10 years to complete. They explained this in a leaflet they sent to all household prior to the EU membership referendum.

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seahermit
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Re: EU Elections

Postby seahermit » Sat Jun 01, 2019 1:51 am

I think you may be right, although your statement contradicts things you implied earlier!

Nobody had any misapprehensions suggesting a quick and easy result, i.e. a swift exit from the EU. It was obvious that sorting out the ramifications and tying up loose ends would take a few years. However, no politician ever suggested that Brexit itself would not happen for ten years, otherwise the firm exit date agreed with the EU (now moved to October) would not have been fixed.

None of that alters the fact that Brexit should have actually happened, full stop. If there were still complex issues to be resolved and argued about - we have the whole of the future to negotiate and sort it all out.

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Richard
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Re: EU Elections

Postby Richard » Sat Jun 01, 2019 11:26 am

seahermit,
I think we all know why it's taking such a long time, because T. May tried to resolve the vote to leave by repeatedly presenting a deal which failed to gain the required support, even inside her own Party.
A 'no-deal' choice looks even less likely to gain sufficient votes, even inside and certainly outside the Tory Party and remember that T. May only just got enough votes to form a government by bribing the D.U.P.
So, a weak government, insufficient support, even internally and, importantly, on top of that a parliament that can block Tory Party executive, 'solutions', that it deems to lack wider, democratic, support.
T. May's Tory government has hit two brick walls, disagreement both within and without her own (weak) Party.

Ed209
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Re: EU Elections

Postby Ed209 » Sat Jun 01, 2019 11:35 am

Brexit is extremely unlikely to happen at all, whomever becomes prime minister until people take to the streets.
The political class and liberal elite have no intention of honouring the referendum result.
Unless it gets to the point where their is either major widespread public disorder or assassination of leading remain MPs nothing will change.
We effectively have a Vichy government controlled by Europe.
Until that is challenged we are no longer living in a democracy.

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seahermit
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Re: EU Elections

Postby seahermit » Sat Jun 01, 2019 11:50 am

The suggestion that Theresa May is some sort of Marshal Petain, a puppet leader dictated to by jackbooted EU officials, is quite funny. Total nonsense of course.

The UK is a flawed democracy, a lot of problems currently but those will be argued about and sorted out in some way eventually. There is no comparison with a right-wing totalitarian state.

Your repellent suggestion that there should be assassination of MPs is the sort of espousal of political violence which led to the rise of Fascist states in the thirties. Thankfully very British people's minds work in that fashion, or ever will.

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Richard
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Re: EU Elections

Postby Richard » Sat Jun 01, 2019 6:00 pm

The UK is not a flawed democracy, far from it, the use of a referendum was a flawed device.

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seahermit
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Re: EU Elections

Postby seahermit » Sun Jun 02, 2019 1:42 am

I don't recall you (or anyone else at all publicly) prior to the referendum, claiming that it was the wrong device to settle the ongoing debate over our EU membership. Indeed, the opposite was the case - the clamour for a public referendum came from all sides and continued for several years, even the major political parties publicly endorsed the idea of it but, fearing that the verdict would be the "wrong" one from their particular viewpoint, took as much time as they could get away with before finally giving in to pressure and agreeing to a national vote.

The Referendum was in fact pure democracy in action. In Ancient Athens, they did just the same thing - peasants, farmers, soldiers, merchants, (even some freed slaves!) came into the town and occupied the agora, listened to a few demagogues haranguing them and then literally stuck their hands up: "Yes, we do want to go to war!" "No, we don't want a trade agreement with the Miletians!"

No political system is perfect, the UK democracy is better than many systems in the world but has a lot of faults - things which do not work as smoothly as they should, legislation which does not deliver the results political planners expected or which do not, fairly and evenly, direct help/resources to the people who are targeted. Also systems which simply become out-of-step with the society around them which has modernised and changed. Add to that human failings - politicians who just don't listen to the people they are meant to be representing, or those who consciously break the rules and fall victim to greed, dishonesty and corruption. But the British constitutional state has been evolving for centuries - we have to make the best of the system we have and hope that, with checks and balances and dealing with defects as they arise, we will move towards a workable and mainly functioning political system.


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