Politics is Stupid

Oh there’s plenty of fear mongering all right but having to re-establish all our trade deals from a weaker footing without the backup of the Eurozone? This is going to be an entirely shit decade to live in England.

But maybe not Scotland. They’ve already announced plans for a second “Leave the UK” referendum, and an on-the-spot Ipsus Mori (one of the more reliable pollsters) poll has shown that of the 3000ish people they asked in the Midlothians (Scottish Border region below Edinburgh) the desire to leave the UK has risen from 30ish% to 80ish% (can’t remember the exact numbers, was listening to the radio while driving in rush-hour).

If Scotland leaves and remains in the EU, then it’ll be given vastly preferential treatment then England. Maybe then they’ll realise that “increased sovereignty” (whatever that was supposed to mean, the UK was still fully capable of enacting our own laws and indeed we did on a daily basis) really means “decreased chances of anyone we like talking to us again”.

Heck even in Northern Ireland they’re talking about holding a Unification Referendum which would see the RoI re-assume control of the whole island… major steps away from a “strong and united UK”.

So the UK could possibly end up being just England and Wales?

1 Like

The UnUnited Kingdom.

1 Like

Yeah, pretty much. But since Wales is still technically a principality (much to their combined ire) it would really just be the Kingdom of England and Wales. The whole United bit would be out the window. Much like most of the government by that point.

One of these statements contradicts the other.

I’m sure that’s not the only court they won’t be bound by anymore. But I don’t remember the UK being a bed of horribleness before the EU, and this really sounds like what people were predicting when the EU started would eventually happen. Hell, people in Germany are still using Marks for currency.

1 Like

That’s my point. We never lost sovereignty, we simply had another layer of legal courts above our own. But they never stopped us doing anything unless it went directly against a Europe-wide law, which we would have agreed to the creation of in the first place. Which is why the whole sovereignty thing was bullshit to begin with.

Oh, and this:
http://brexittonb.com

A friend of mine just bought brexitsucks.com and is hoping to monetize the news with an ad scheme somehow. I think he’s at the “collect underpants” stage of this scheme.

Even if they are enforcing laws that you voted on, it’s still a level of government above yours, therefor you aren’t sovereign. For one thing, they are elected, or selected by, people that other people besides your nation voted for. If there was a majority of “X” influenced people in the EU, but not in the UK, you could end up with even your own hundreds of years old laws being reinterpreted by people with whom your society shares nothing with.

This is part of the issue the US has with the ICC and similar organizations.

Individual states in the US make trade deals with countries all the time, and GB did this themselves for ages, Bulk, or group, discounts aren’t always the best.

Except that as a founding nation we had a veto vote. All the 12 founding members had the power to individually stop something they didn’t like. Now only 11 of them do.

And it’s true that bulk isn’t always best, but take for example our failing steel industry: the government refused to bail them out because it is simply financially unviable to save British steel manufacturing. The high levels of workplace safety, high wages for trained staff, training fees themselves, maintenance et al meant that simply running the factories at all was running at a loss. And the steel itself? Not worth enough to make the factories break even, because even without the EU we have a trade deal with China whereby we get lots and lots and lots of cheap steel transported to where we want it for a fraction of the cost of simply turning on the blast furnaces for a day.

If it wasn’t for your statement saying that the court was stopping the government from screwing the people, I’d buy that, but obviously, something outside your country could prevent things from happening in your country.

Yeah, we’ve had the same steel issues. However, some foundries have rolled back union excesses, and there were enough, and modernized and made it, and the government here paid attention because being able to make steel is a good thing.

Indeed it could, but generally speaking over the past two decades, of the less-than-50 times a new government motion has to have been amended in order to comply with things like Human Rights, Ecology Protection etc, the motion itself had been a vastly unpopular one to begin with, and EU mediation made the motion less unattractive. The less-than-50 figure is important because it’s compared to a figure close to 10,000 where we’ve been able to make new motions with no intervention whatsoever. So the EU over the last few decades had an interference percentile of 0.5%. Oh no, my poor precious independent sovereignty. :rolling_eyes:

Undoubtably having local and national industry is a brilliant thing, to be encouraged and new development welcomed. Unfortunately, regardless of our status on the global market, our industries began declining long before the common market was a thing. Steel has been in trouble since the 1960s, coal since the 1970s, heck I don’t know what we’re going to do about agriculture because 76% of farms in the UK are maintained by grants from the EU. Without them, heritage farming is bust. Without them, oilseed and cereals are bust. Without them, dairy farming is bust. The only farming sectors in actual profit are sheep farms for wool, pig farms for meat, and cow farms for meat.

We need energy industry revival; the current government scrapped all plans for that, not the EU. We need masonry; the government killed the apprenticeship scheme that was keeping the mason and bricklaying industry afloat. We desperately need people with basic joinery, plumbing and electrical skills; again, apprenticeships are dead and last year the price for the annual electrical safety certificate went from £1,000 to £2,400. Again, nothing to do with the EU. This was our own government.

I’ve said before, Brexit in of itself isn’t that dangerous, but while we have a government in power that is so massively out of touch with reality to the point where instead of funding wind turbines on one of the windiest islands in Europe, they’re borrowing diesel generators from Germany in order to stop the power grid failing. Instead of funding apprenticeships to keep our industries open, they’ve been funding railway projects that are literally going to kill off any and all business startups in the Midlands because all talent will drain to London. Instead of funding basic healthcare needs like fucking ambulances, they’re planning on building one single nuclear power plant in the South that is based on designs so old that the factory making the parts is having to bring machinery out of museums, which will have a power output so small that by the time it has completed, it will be outputting less than 18% of the power required in that immediate area of the national power grid.

Gee @Woodman, our arguments are getting rather intellectual :stuck_out_tongue:

Edited math update

Wow. That was so thick o read. I know if I really understand any of it. However,

One thing I heard mentioned by regular citizens of the UK is that they voted to leave because they were tired of being one of one four countries actually making their required payments but still had to fund the countries that didn’t pay in. Which would piss me off too. Oh wait, sub people for countries and it does make me irritated here in the US…

Two, we Scots have been trying to leave for so long (like, since the crown was stolen from our line) that it would really surprise me if they voted to leave the UK and then voted to join the EU. Given the fierce stubbornness and independent streak of most of us, its hard to believe they would leave one grouping to join another…

1 Like

A lot of people here look at it as a national defense thing. Steel works, farming, research and development, technology, the biggest reason not to outsource all of that and just be a service economy is without those things we can’t stand on our own two feet.

Any country can be bullied, or beaten in war, or economically overwhelmed. And most countries can’t survive long periods without outside intervention, the US without trade runs out of a lot of things very quickly, but at least we could still support our population, if at a lower standard of living. Hell, according to quite a few people, who don’t really understand how the world works, we’d end up better off eventually. I don’t think so, but there is a kernel of truth in that.

Hey, at least the UK is building something new, didn’t Germany shut all it’s nukes down? I’ve been reading too much near future fiction lately, I don’t know where nuclear reactors are in development, but I thought we were much more advanced than the last ones that were actually built.

Bite me Limey. :frowning:

Newish. It’s a generation one style reactor in a world of 4th gen reactors. They produce a little more power but hey they leak like three mile island (or our home equivalent, Winscale)

Germany has shut down all its nuclear power stations yes, but they also have massive government funding for green power - indeed they’re world leaders in how much of their grid is powered by wind and solar. The U.K. on the other hand ceased all government funding for renewable energies, including hydroelectric where we used to be world leaders. We really shot ourselves in both feet by doing so. Like I said before, some places now rely on diesel generators to supply the local grid because we’re operating well below demand.

I totally agree with you about industry, which is why I’m so worried. We don’t have any in profit, at all. And now that our economy just tanked to levels not seen since the recession in the 80s - let alone the credit crunch in 2008 - I don’t think industry is going to recover anywhere near fast enough to support any form of growth.

Not that this will especially matter to my household, we’ve already started the application process to move to Ireland.

1 Like

I’m still not sold on current tech actually being able to meet the need. I think the money currently being plowed into substandard solutions could easily fund the replacement tech.

And what kills me is that doing things like making widgets is how you are supposed to dig out of these. I think the bottom floor for costs has gotten so high either from regulatory capture through safety, environmental, and hiring restrictions.

There is an issue if you can’t lower the cost of producing something locally below the cost to ship something halfway across the globe. I think that’s why there are so many small businesses opening in America every day, and why Etsy and start up websites are so big now. If all you have is yourself or you and two friends, you can skip the things that make things so expensive.

Here, Johnny and Suzy can start making widgets and selling them on Etsy, then they can crowd fund to hire Bob, Joe, and Elaine. But once they crack 10 employees, regulations start hitting, then 20, then 25, then 50 kills a lot of businesses. We have to keep growing, but adding employee 50 is going to triple our regulatory costs, then 100, 150, 300.

It’s too difficult to grow a big company now days by making things. People hope to make an impact so they can sell out to one of a couple dozen companies, then people complain because of the lack of competition, because of laws that sound reasonable, but kill competition. GE can afford thousands of lawyers to meet compliance and analyze new laws, two yokels with an idea can’t.

If, in a worst case scenario, the EU falls apart isn’t that going to be one of the worse places to be since they are one of the most notorious countries being propped up by the EU?

Come on, lets be honest here, they are building something old.

Actually, that would probably be somewhere like Norway*, where around 95% of their power is from hydro. Or Brazil, who produce around 80% from hydro (but produce 3 times as much hydro power).
England doesn’t even register :confounded:

* I’m discounting the smaller countries where they may have 100% of their power from hydro, but use less power than a gated subdivision

Wouldn’t it be interesting if the English system broke down completely and they petitioned to become part of the United States?

Not hilariously funny, just an interesting thought.

1 Like

Ah my generalisation caught up with me, I wasn’t referring directly to all hydro power, more to the massive tidal-force generators that were developed in the 90s and all the research that went with them before the government shut it down because they needed a reason to start fracking.

Well? What about it?

4 Likes

Personally I wish Scotland and Northern Ireland the best of luck in their respective endeavours.

I’m still off to Ireland. Even made myself a neat two year plan. Like Stalin, only faster and with less starving to death…