Brexit the economy and house prices part 7: Brexit Harder

westernpromise

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

What Clarke wants is totally, completely and utterly irrelevant unless there is reason to believe he can achieve it. Can he? No, so that's irrelevant.

I don't think you're following. To win, Remain needed people like me, who didn't vote Remain, to do so. People like me hear Clarke saying (constructively) that he wants to abolish nation states. I don't hear anything that tells me this can't happen. I also hear Cameron saying he wants some other version of the EU short of that and I don't hear anything to tell me that will happen either. I hear people in this thread saying the status quo means that nothing changes and also that everything does.

Your personal confidence in one outcome or the other doesn't persuade. This is what Remain failed to grasp. You never came up with a description of what Remain actually means - Clarke's Remain? Cameron's Remain? Clegg's Remain? Corbyn's Remain? - nor with evidence that it is deliverable, nor that it was stable, nor for that matter was the working ever shown that what Remaining costs is worth it. Arguments that persuade you are no good. You need arguments that persuade me. The same applies to Leave, of course. We give up sovereignty, we get X. We regain sovereignty, it costs Y. Is it worth it?

Like I asked in my previous post, if the pull is so strong, why are so many countries still outside the euro?

The trouble with that argument is twofold. One, if the EU is so great why are 170 countries not in it? And two, if we join/stay in the euro/EU, in the future, who else will be in it, and what might that mean?

In order to prove that Remain means different things / not the status quo, you'd need to prove:

• that the EU is very likely to change in some very material way in the near future, OR
• that there is enough division among EU leaders on which direction to take that it is impossible to predict which direction the EU will take

I don't need to prove anything. I'm the equivocal voter who requires the opposite to the above proved to me. The fact the EEC is now the EU is ample empirical evidence of the direction of travel. If the EU's two most significant members reckon there will be a European army, those are good grounds for thinking there will be a European army. You can't just instruct people to be obtuse and not bring this stuff up.

??? Something like that would require unanimity. There is nothing even remotely close to unanimity on that point. So how can you be so sure it will happen? I had asked , no answer, so I ask again.

You need to prove to me that it can't to get my vote. If you suggest that something Macron and Merkel both want can't happen, well, listen to yourself. Like I said, if you insist that black is white, you'll be disbelieved when you later claim that white is white.

Sigh... Please, not the usual nonsense...
Do I need to remind you that British ministers are not appointed directly, either?

I pointed this out to you above but you're still doing it. The issue is that the EU's institutions appear structurally contrived to evade accountability. You'd expect an unaccountable organisation to be corrupt and kleptocratic and the EU never disappoints. There are the accounts that don't get signed off. There is the remarkable prevalence of criminality, both among its MEPs (recall how many UKIP MEPs have been jailed for fraud) and its other officials. The new head of the ECB was convicted of a criminal offence, but it was politically decided that she wasn't a criminal. With her record, she wouldn't be allowed to sell insurance in the UK. What other central bank is run by a convicted criminal? Likewise, little people wouldn't be allowed to remain directors of firms whose accounts could not be signed off.

Why should I vote for more of that? The fact that other democratic systems have flaws doesn't excuse the EU's flaws. Two wrongs don't make a right.

That the only alternative would be to give less power to the national governments, which currently nominate commissioners, and more to the EU parliament?

No, that's not the only alternative. Another would be the radically novel idea of having the composition of the commission reflect the results of the EU election. So in each country, whoever won that gets their country's EU commissioner's seat. Individual commissioners then propose whatever measures they like, but they'd have to get it adopted by majorities on first the commission and then in the parliament. What would be wrong with that? At present, commissioners are nominated by governments that may well have lost the relevant EU election and that were elected on a domestic platform in which their EU agenda probably never figured and wasn't debated. Nobody knows who ours is, what their agenda is, or how they got there. My suggestion would mean instead that we knew who we were sending to the EU commission and what s/he would try to do there. The result could easily be a commission with a centre-right majority that favours unwinding political integration in favour of a free trade area.

Brexiters cannot have it both ways:

Again with the Brexiters nonsense. I'm a neutral because both sides are liars and dissemblers.

So your point is that Remain lost because those who voted Leave were experts in comparative constitutional law who appreciated all the subtleties and finer details??? Fake news and populism had nothing to do with it?

Remain lost for many reasons, but the unifying thread was a supercilious failure to engage with the arguments that actually persuaded people to vote Leave or not vote at all.

Are you familiar with Carole cadwalladr's reporting on fake news?

No.

FWIW I think the key error of the Remain campaign was to focus too much on the negatives of leaving the EU and not do a good job of selling all the positives. Positive messages are always more likely to win.

The key error was to fail to deal properly with the negatives of staying, not those of leaving.

I fail to see the relevance. BTW, this graduate tax (because that's what it is, not a student loan but a graduate tax) makes perfect sense because it means that the more you benefit from university education, the more you pay, which is how a fair and progressive tax system should work. The previous system of getting everyone to pay for a minority was unfair and regressive.

And yet parties are desperately casting around for a solution to an imagined snowflake grievance because there are votes in it. They can either state the above which has failed or they can think of some sort of reform to appease the snowflakes. Remain should have addressed Leavers' actual concerns whether they agreed with them or not.

SouthLondonUser

westernpromise wrote: »

The trouble with that argument is twofold. One, if the EU is so great why are 170 countries not in it? And two, if we join/stay in the euro/EU, in the future, who else will be in it, and what might that mean?

170 countries? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha :rotfl::rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

Did you read what you wrote? Why not 170 countries? Well, mm, I don't know, maybe the hint is in the name: "European Union". Maybe the fact that there are way fewer than 170 countries in Europe might explain why the European Union does NOT have 170 countries in it. What do you think? Does this explanation sound convincing enough???

170 countries... Seriously, I couldn't have made this stuff up...

The Leave campaign successfully scared voters into thinking Albania and Turkey would have joined, but it was FAKE NEWS.

Then: again with what Cameron wanted. When did he say that? He tried to extract more concessions from the EU. He failed. That’s why he called the referendum. Did he, just after calling the referendum , continue to insist that he would get the EU to change in I-don’t-know-what-way? As far as I can recall, no. If my recollection is wrong, well, it would have taken less than half a brain to see through that nonsense.

Was Clarke wrong in saying what he said? Yes. Could and should the Remain campaign have articulated a better message? Absolutely.
None of that means there was any reason to think remain would have meant anything other than the status quo.

I refer you back to my original questions: in the Brexit camp, you had Brexiters who said different things about the meaning of Brexit soft, hard, deal, no deal, etc) and Brexiters who have backtracked on their own version of Brexit. I asked about comparable examples in the Remain camp and all you have managed to come up with is people who have switched sides and Clarke who seems to want more integration than the Germans and the French.

On the European Army: I don’t know how else to repeat this strikingly banal concept. The decision requires unanimity. Please, please, pretty please, explain how something which requires unanimity but on which only 2 or 3 leaders out of 28 (27 if you exclude the UK) are keen has any chance of being approved in this lifetime.
I.
Do.
Not.
Get.
It.
I need to prove it to you? Well, again, for the trillionth time, only a handful of leaders out of 27/28 are in favour of it. I don’t know what more proof you might want.

westernpromise wrote: »

No, that's not the only alternative. Another would be the radically novel idea of having the composition of the commission reflect the results of the EU election. So in each country, whoever won that gets their country's EU commissioner's seat.

Define win. You are again thinking with a FPTP mindset which does not translate into a proportional system. What if a right-wing party gets 35%, but two left-wing parties get 25% and 20% and make an alliance? But let's leave that aside. What you are proposing is simply a variant of what I said: giving more power to the European Parliament and less power to the national governments which currently nominate Commissioners.

westernpromise wrote: »

Individual commissioners then propose whatever measures they like, but they'd have to get it adopted by majorities on first the commission and then in the parliament.

This doesn't sound too different from the current process, to be honest.

westernpromise wrote: »

What would be wrong with that?

Like I said, this alternative makes national governments much less powerful in the process. Which is a perfectly legitimate alternative, but there is to be clarity: more power to MEPs means less power to national governments. Again, I struggle to see how Eurosceptics could have possibly ever been fine with that.

westernpromise wrote: »

The key error was to fail to deal properly with the negatives of staying, not those of leaving.
.

I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on this...

Tromking

Zero_Gravitas wrote: »

Easiest trade deal in history...
£350 million a week for the NHS...
Lies have been the gullible brexiteers’ friends...

Again, the use of the word “lies” is so unnecessarily pejorative.
Brexit is as it has always been, a personal judgment call.
When people who share your world view on Brexit claimed that immediately post the referendum result that the U.K. would enter a recession, I didn’t think afterward that they were caught out lying, I realised that their judgment borne of of the need to scare the populace was just terrible.
Project Fear was a Remain tactic to influence the gullible, I wasn’t fooled, were you?

SouthLondonUser

Was the NHS bus a judgement call or a lie?
How about saying that Albania and Turkey were about to join the EU - judgement call or lie?
I could go on, but do I need to?

phillw

westernpromise wrote: »

Of course.

Within the Conservative party, George Osborne is a Remainer who has argued that we should not relinquish access to the single market in return for control over free movement; Anna Soubry of the same party (at the time) is a Remainer who indicated she could vote against the repeal of any of the legislation enacting EU laws. Kenneth Clarke looks "forward to the day when the Westminster Parliament is just a Council Chamber in Europe”; David Cameron in contrast "wanted to allow Britain to discriminate against citizens from other EU countries by excluding them from in-work benefits, unless they had lived in the UK for four years...but is open to alternatives that deliver the desired result of less immigration from the EU." These self evidently are not interchangeable positions, and that's within one party.

You missed the point, the question was what remain meant. Not what they'd like to see in the future. Ken Clark and Anna Soubry haven't said that remain means anything more than what was already happening.

Within the leave campaign before and after what leave meant has radically changed to the point where it's the leave supporters that have prevented us from leaving.

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

Was the NHS bus a judgement call or a lie?
How about saying that Albania and Turkey were about to join the EU - judgement call or lie?
I could go on, but do I need to?

Assaulting a girlfriend is a judgement call, lying about your illegitimate children is a judgment call.

It was also a judgement call that got him sacked, he made a judgement call to make up a quote.

He is a lying scumbag. He has royally f*cked the country for his own gain, he didn't even believe in leaving the EU until he saw how it would lead him to power. I wouldn't trust him to run a bath. His weak willed followers have a lot to answer for.

adindas wrote: »

If they could do that easily without increasing the cost they would have done that by now.

Who said anything about "without increasing cost"? The cost will increase by a no deal brexit and then be reduced to acceptable levels by going around us. The problem we face is that the EU has integrity while our future prime minister has none.

adindas wrote: »

To substitute 85% of the port you rely on for your export import in a very short time is unthinkable with a headline deficit in the region of 0.5 percent to -1.5 percent of GDP.

This was a major part of the EU no deal planning, which I believe has been completed. The integrity of the single market is a priority for the EU, they'll deal with it.

westernpromise wrote: »

It is simply beyond argument that there are different versions of Remain.

No, you're confusing "remaining in the EU" with "the future". Nobody is expecting people to define leave as what you'll have for breakfast five years from now. Nobody can agree on what leave means on leaving day. Your examples of people wanting to try to go through the uphill struggle of getting 28 countries to agree to it is what remain means.

I have to wonder what happened to you that you're so scared of 28 countries working together democratically.

Whether we have the Euro instead of sterling or an EU army should be about practicalities of it, not whether someone doesn't trust foreigners or not.

lisyloo

Tromking wrote: »

Again, the use of the word “lies” is so unnecessarily pejorative.
Brexit is as it has always been, a personal judgment call.
When people who share your world view on Brexit claimed that immediately post the referendum result that the U.K. would enter a recession, I didn’t think afterward that they were caught out lying, I realised that their judgment borne of of the need to scare the populace was just terrible.
Project Fear was a Remain tactic to influence the gullible, I wasn’t fooled, were you?

Martin Lewis one question time last night said there were lies on both sides. Are you going to tell him he’s wrong?

phillw

lisyloo wrote: »

Martin Lewis one question time last night said there were lies on both sides. Are you going to tell him he’s wrong?

I would ask him why he said that. I think there is a clear distinction between criticisms towards both sides. I have never heard anyone explain anything about the remain campaign that would make me say it was a lie, but on the leave side it's a completely different story. Aaron banks wrote a book where he (which I've not personally read but supposedly) says he led us up the garden path.

Saying both sides lied doesn't even solve the problem. It assumes that it was just a popularity contest with no consequences. Anyone who says it has no interest in democracy or the will of the people.

SouthLondonUser

What phillw said.

Tell me what martin thinks were lies and why, and I'll tell you if I agree with that or not. Or do you expect me to just accept something passively, without even knowing what it is, just because Martin Lewis said it?

lisyloo

SouthLondonUser wrote: »

What phillw said.

Tell me what martin thinks were lies and why, and I'll tell you if I agree with that or not. Or do you expect me to just accept something passively, without even knowing what it is, just because Martin Lewis said it?

No I expect you to watch the recording and see the context for yourself (not my recollection on it) if you are interested in it.

Takedap

lisyloo wrote: »

No I expect you to watch the recording and see the context for yourself (not my recollection on it) if you are interested in it.

It was interesting from a psychological point of view to watch the body language of the Jeremy Hunt supporter on the panel.


While she was talking about Hunt wanting the economy to expand, her hands were constantly giving shrinking gestures.