The last bloody thing this country needs is another vote on EU membership, to bring all the bloody grifters and liars back out of the woodwork and create a massive (and artificial) divide in our society to the detriment of all.
Imagine if France decided to have a second Dreyfuss Affair.
They did, they brought him back to France and had a second trial! Because they got it wrong the first time!
Indeed. Though the echos live today. You find quite a few “Dreyfus was guilty” types among the Le Pen Fan Club
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Oh great we're back on the wanting another democratic vote is not democratic bandwagon.
Excellent.
I'd go further. There should never be another vote on anything once there has already been a vote on that thing. Whether Police & Crime Commissioners, General Election, In/Out referendums, you name it.
Much more democratic that way.
Oh, great, we're back on the wilfully misrepresenting the other point of view bandwagon.
It has been said many times, perhaps by you not a few times, that having another vote on EU membership would not be democratic.
No.
It was said that having another vote in an attempt to overturn the first vote instead of implementing it would have been anti-democratic.
Having a rejoin vote now that Brexit has happened would be prefectly democratic.
Democracy: people vote, things happen, people vote again.
Not democracy: people vote, politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again".
Oh and politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again" at every General Election.
No, not really. The 2015 general election didn't reverse the 2010 general election because the 650 winners of that election became MPs for the duration of the 2010 parliament. Candidates don't have to win two elections to become MPs, no matter how egregious.
You seem to be having a problem with this. There are two issues which you seem unable to grasp.
You are talking about the same people who voted for Option A instead of Option B being asked to vote again to decide upon Option A or Option B. If you said we want a bunch of aliens to come in and vote between A & B then yes absolutely you would have a point. But it is the same people so some of those who originally voted for one option might then have decided to vote for the other. Perfectly democratic. It is never undemocratic to ask the people to vote on something. Impractical, an admin nightmare maybe, but not undemocratic.
And wrt your GE example, by your reckoning every manifesto pledge would have to be enacted before there could be another general election to choose a new government.
It's not "the same people", some die, some come of age.
It is undemocratic to say to people "we aren't going to do what you voted for, so you have to vote again and get it right this time".
At a general election, what people vote for is for the winning candidate in each constituency to become an MP. Manifestoes are officially irrelevant (R (Wheeler) v Office of the PM).
None of this is slightly difficult, you're talking yourself into knots because you won't admit that you think that getting the "right answer" on the EU is more important than democracy.
Jesus that's also democracy. You ask people to vote de temps en temps and they change their mind, become eligible to vote, die, etc.
You can't freeze in aspic any particular democratic decision. .
Oh, for fuck's sake. I AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU CAN OR SHOULD.
All I am saying is, if the people vote for something to happen, it is uindemocratic for politicians to refuse to implement it and make people vote again in lieu of implementing it.
You really aren't thick. I can't believe that you don't actually grasp my point. So why are you pretending not to?
Depends, especially if there's a biggish gap in time between the vote and the implimentation.
If, after 2016, there had been a massive lurch in public opinion of an "OMG What Have We Done This Is Clearly A Mistake" type, then it would have been mad and frankly undemocratic for the government to say "Tough luck- you voted for this, now you are going to get it, good and hard".
In this case, that lurch didn't happen, at least not quickly enough or substantially enough to really be called a lurch;
"It's a mistake" had a consistent but small lead from about summer 2018, which only really opened up from summer 2021.
I think I'd agree with you that the polling from 2018 wasn't really enough to require an "are you sure about this" second referendum. But clearly there is a threshold where it would be the democratic thing to do.
Stalling to try and get such a gap to develop doesn't seem particularly democratic to me?
Is this where HYUFD pops up and insists again that if you compare the General Election voting intention polls to the post-Local Election NEV calculation (rather than compare GE opinion polls to GE opinion polls to get a flavour of opinion shifting), the Lib Dems are well down whilst the Tories are level and therefore there is a guaranteed swing to the Tories from the Lib Dems and a swathe of seats will go blue from yellow?
You may dislike it but in councils the LDs gained in 2019 like Chelmsford or Guidlford or Waverley or South Oxfordshire or now control like Tunbridge Wells there is potential for Tory gains on current polls. My parents live in Tunbridge Wells and the local LD council is already unpopular due to parking restrictions etc. Same goes for potential Tory gains in Residents controlled areas like Uttlesford
There may be local possibilities for gains, but not based on current polls, which have Tories and Lib Dems almost exactly where they were four years ago. Specific councils or councillors having unpopularity isn't based on current polls. Hell, the 2017 Oxfordshire County Council election happened during the height of Theresa May's popularity and by rights the LDs should have been erased; instead they made a couple of actual gains. Due to local being different from national.
Comparing GE opinion polls to NEV calculations is comparing apples to armchairs. LDs always have a big boost in NEV calculations versus opinion polls (which is why anyone extrapolating the NEV share coming out of here directly to a General Election will be as misleading in the other direction, but some media commentators are bound to do just that).
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
A more reasoned rant against those responsible for the conduct of Brexit.
Brexit murdered“moderate” Conservatism Now it justifies the right’s stab-in-the-back myths https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/brexit-murderedmoderate-conservatism ...For understandable, if not forgivable, psychological reasons the right has embraced denial. I do not hold with the liberal-left orthodoxy that Brexit was wholly built on the back of an enormous lie. Boris Johnson lies as easily as he breathes, of course, but a few supporters of Brexit sincerely believed they would inaugurate a national renaissance. When ministers approved a policy document in January 2022 setting out how “the government will use its new freedoms to transform the UK into the best regulated economy in the world,” they were lying to themselves before all others.
Supporters of Brexit cannot believe in May 2023 what they believed in January 2022. But rather than admit to a mistake, the right retreats into a stab-in-the-back myth: the conspiracy theory of the defeated. Brexit was sabotaged by “anti-Brexit activist civil servants” (Dominic Raab), “a Europhile blob” (Daniel Hannan), and “ the objection and obstruction” of remainers (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So intoxicating is the conspiracy theory that not one leading supporter of Brexit has admitted that leaving the European Union was a mistake...
I think it remains to be seen if it was a mistake. Short term economic damage for sure, but where will we be in 10 years, 20 years and 100 years? Its idiotic to make trade harder with a huge trading block right on your doorstep, but most who voted for Brexit imagined that future trade would be unaffected and that they were voting to leave the political institution. Now its easy to mock that, but I believed that too, and I don't consider myself a stupid person, and I also recall being told that this was possible.
I still believe that much closer alignment and easier trade is possible without re-joining, and this will happen.
Full marks for honesty there. Which puts you above pretty well the entire cabinet.
I don't expect much progress on the last bit without a change of government.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
It is worth remembering just how Brexity the 2017 Labour manifesto was. Indeed, it was one of the reasons why the election went horribly wrong for Theresa May.
Sure! But there was no majority, so manifestos largely get set aside for whatever can be voted through. Had that parliament voted for a confirmatory referendum that would have had absolute democratic support as the 2017 parliament is sovereign, not tied by decisions or laws passed by any previous parliament. Or had it opted for hard brexit, the same.
We can disagree with the decisions made and the laws implemented. But either parliament is sovereign or it is not. I find it baffling that the people who demanded sovereignty for our parliament say "but not on this issue".
Anyway, the quickly receding past. The future is "I know we said we wouldn't look for closer ties with the EU, but since taking office we have been shocked to find out just how much of a mess we are in". And other such lies.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
I'm not disputing that the 2017 parliament had the right to do what it did.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Years of those Pink Panther films have always ruined the seriousness of the Dreyfus affair for me. The name just now always makes me think of the long-suffering Commissioner Dreyfus, having an eye-popping apoplectic fit in his monocle.
Ofcourse, in reality it was an epochal clash between emergent modernity and anti-semitic, clericalist reaction in France, as all Sun readers know.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
A more reasoned rant against those responsible for the conduct of Brexit.
Brexit murdered“moderate” Conservatism Now it justifies the right’s stab-in-the-back myths https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/brexit-murderedmoderate-conservatism ...For understandable, if not forgivable, psychological reasons the right has embraced denial. I do not hold with the liberal-left orthodoxy that Brexit was wholly built on the back of an enormous lie. Boris Johnson lies as easily as he breathes, of course, but a few supporters of Brexit sincerely believed they would inaugurate a national renaissance. When ministers approved a policy document in January 2022 setting out how “the government will use its new freedoms to transform the UK into the best regulated economy in the world,” they were lying to themselves before all others.
Supporters of Brexit cannot believe in May 2023 what they believed in January 2022. But rather than admit to a mistake, the right retreats into a stab-in-the-back myth: the conspiracy theory of the defeated. Brexit was sabotaged by “anti-Brexit activist civil servants” (Dominic Raab), “a Europhile blob” (Daniel Hannan), and “ the objection and obstruction” of remainers (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So intoxicating is the conspiracy theory that not one leading supporter of Brexit has admitted that leaving the European Union was a mistake...
I think it remains to be seen if it was a mistake. Short term economic damage for sure, but where will we be in 10 years, 20 years and 100 years? Its idiotic to make trade harder with a huge trading block right on your doorstep, but most who voted for Brexit imagined that future trade would be unaffected and that they were voting to leave the political institution. Now its easy to mock that, but I believed that too, and I don't consider myself a stupid person, and I also recall being told that this was possible.
I still believe that much closer alignment and easier trade is possible without re-joining, and this will happen.
Full marks for honesty there. Which puts you above pretty well the entire cabinet.
I don't expect much progress on the last bit without a change of government.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Apparently it's quite common for voters to say things like "I'm going to vote for the Labour because they want to stop all those immigrants".
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Edit to add - I suspect the election of Corbyn who seems to have been quietly in favour of Brexit didn't help the Remain cause because Labour didn't really provide a united front with the Tories on why remain was a good idea. So Brexit is all Ed Milband's "£3 gets you a vote" fault.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
I'm not disputing that the 2017 parliament had the right to do what it did.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Indeed. Parliaments pass lots of bad laws that need replacing. This parliament seems to pass new border laws every year which say the law enacted the year before was useless!
Point is, that no matter how bad the law, parliament is able to pass it because it is not bound by the past. Nor even international treaties and agreements - some Tory MPs insisting we leave the ECHR as an example.
So we all agree the principle. But with demands for an exception only for the Brexit referendum, which wasn't even law. You can say that ignoring it was politically not in the right, and that is a valid argument from one perspective. But ultimately that is a political decision where every MP has to seek re-election based on their record. Somehow the Brexit referendum was deemed to be different. Overruling all other considerations and realities. The only thing that could bind parliament.
Which, when you step back from the issue and talk about the principle, is absurd.
Oh great we're back on the wanting another democratic vote is not democratic bandwagon.
Excellent.
I'd go further. There should never be another vote on anything once there has already been a vote on that thing. Whether Police & Crime Commissioners, General Election, In/Out referendums, you name it.
Much more democratic that way.
Oh, great, we're back on the wilfully misrepresenting the other point of view bandwagon.
It has been said many times, perhaps by you not a few times, that having another vote on EU membership would not be democratic.
No.
It was said that having another vote in an attempt to overturn the first vote instead of implementing it would have been anti-democratic.
Having a rejoin vote now that Brexit has happened would be prefectly democratic.
Democracy: people vote, things happen, people vote again.
Not democracy: people vote, politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again".
Oh and politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again" at every General Election.
No, not really. The 2015 general election didn't reverse the 2010 general election because the 650 winners of that election became MPs for the duration of the 2010 parliament. Candidates don't have to win two elections to become MPs, no matter how egregious.
You seem to be having a problem with this. There are two issues which you seem unable to grasp.
You are talking about the same people who voted for Option A instead of Option B being asked to vote again to decide upon Option A or Option B. If you said we want a bunch of aliens to come in and vote between A & B then yes absolutely you would have a point. But it is the same people so some of those who originally voted for one option might then have decided to vote for the other. Perfectly democratic. It is never undemocratic to ask the people to vote on something. Impractical, an admin nightmare maybe, but not undemocratic.
And wrt your GE example, by your reckoning every manifesto pledge would have to be enacted before there could be another general election to choose a new government.
It's not "the same people", some die, some come of age.
It is undemocratic to say to people "we aren't going to do what you voted for, so you have to vote again and get it right this time".
At a general election, what people vote for is for the winning candidate in each constituency to become an MP. Manifestoes are officially irrelevant (R (Wheeler) v Office of the PM).
None of this is slightly difficult, you're talking yourself into knots because you won't admit that you think that getting the "right answer" on the EU is more important than democracy.
Jesus that's also democracy. You ask people to vote de temps en temps and they change their mind, become eligible to vote, die, etc.
You can't freeze in aspic any particular democratic decision. .
Oh, for fuck's sake. I AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU CAN OR SHOULD.
All I am saying is, if the people vote for something to happen, it is uindemocratic for politicians to refuse to implement it and make people vote again in lieu of implementing it.
You really aren't thick. I can't believe that you don't actually grasp my point. So why are you pretending not to?
Depends, especially if there's a biggish gap in time between the vote and the implimentation.
If, after 2016, there had been a massive lurch in public opinion of an "OMG What Have We Done This Is Clearly A Mistake" type, then it would have been mad and frankly undemocratic for the government to say "Tough luck- you voted for this, now you are going to get it, good and hard".
In this case, that lurch didn't happen, at least not quickly enough or substantially enough to really be called a lurch;
"It's a mistake" had a consistent but small lead from about summer 2018, which only really opened up from summer 2021.
I think I'd agree with you that the polling from 2018 wasn't really enough to require an "are you sure about this" second referendum. But clearly there is a threshold where it would be the democratic thing to do.
The correct second referendum would have been choose between:
Accept Mays deal now Carry on negotiating for up to another year at which point have another GE if can't get anywhere.
Oh great we're back on the wanting another democratic vote is not democratic bandwagon.
Excellent.
I'd go further. There should never be another vote on anything once there has already been a vote on that thing. Whether Police & Crime Commissioners, General Election, In/Out referendums, you name it.
Much more democratic that way.
Oh, great, we're back on the wilfully misrepresenting the other point of view bandwagon.
It has been said many times, perhaps by you not a few times, that having another vote on EU membership would not be democratic.
No.
It was said that having another vote in an attempt to overturn the first vote instead of implementing it would have been anti-democratic.
Having a rejoin vote now that Brexit has happened would be prefectly democratic.
Democracy: people vote, things happen, people vote again.
Not democracy: people vote, politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again".
Oh and politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again" at every General Election.
No, not really. The 2015 general election didn't reverse the 2010 general election because the 650 winners of that election became MPs for the duration of the 2010 parliament. Candidates don't have to win two elections to become MPs, no matter how egregious.
You seem to be having a problem with this. There are two issues which you seem unable to grasp.
You are talking about the same people who voted for Option A instead of Option B being asked to vote again to decide upon Option A or Option B. If you said we want a bunch of aliens to come in and vote between A & B then yes absolutely you would have a point. But it is the same people so some of those who originally voted for one option might then have decided to vote for the other. Perfectly democratic. It is never undemocratic to ask the people to vote on something. Impractical, an admin nightmare maybe, but not undemocratic.
And wrt your GE example, by your reckoning every manifesto pledge would have to be enacted before there could be another general election to choose a new government.
It's not "the same people", some die, some come of age.
It is undemocratic to say to people "we aren't going to do what you voted for, so you have to vote again and get it right this time".
At a general election, what people vote for is for the winning candidate in each constituency to become an MP. Manifestoes are officially irrelevant (R (Wheeler) v Office of the PM).
None of this is slightly difficult, you're talking yourself into knots because you won't admit that you think that getting the "right answer" on the EU is more important than democracy.
Jesus that's also democracy. You ask people to vote de temps en temps and they change their mind, become eligible to vote, die, etc.
You can't freeze in aspic any particular democratic decision. .
Oh, for fuck's sake. I AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU CAN OR SHOULD.
All I am saying is, if the people vote for something to happen, it is uindemocratic for politicians to refuse to implement it and make people vote again in lieu of implementing it.
You really aren't thick. I can't believe that you don't actually grasp my point. So why are you pretending not to?
Depends, especially if there's a biggish gap in time between the vote and the implimentation.
If, after 2016, there had been a massive lurch in public opinion of an "OMG What Have We Done This Is Clearly A Mistake" type, then it would have been mad and frankly undemocratic for the government to say "Tough luck- you voted for this, now you are going to get it, good and hard".
In this case, that lurch didn't happen, at least not quickly enough or substantially enough to really be called a lurch;
"It's a mistake" had a consistent but small lead from about summer 2018, which only really opened up from summer 2021.
I think I'd agree with you that the polling from 2018 wasn't really enough to require an "are you sure about this" second referendum. But clearly there is a threshold where it would be the democratic thing to do.
Stalling to try and get such a gap to develop doesn't seem particularly democratic to me?
What said anything about stalling?
All I'm saying is that, had the public view shifted a lot between vote and implimentation, it would have been more democratic to stop the process rather than going through with something that the voters of 2016 had wanted but the voters of (2016 + a bit) didn't.
I don't think we got to that scenario, but it was certainly a possibility. And if you think of democracy as an imperfect but sincere attempt to move the country in the way the country wants, rather than a debate game with a winner who gets a prize, you have to allow for that possibility. And if people are willing to run the risk of becoming unpopular by continuing to argue a case they believe in, why should anyone stop them?
The last bloody thing this country needs is another vote on EU membership, to bring all the bloody grifters and liars back out of the woodwork and create a massive (and artificial) divide in our society to the detriment of all.
Imagine if France decided to have a second Dreyfuss Affair.
They did, they brought him back to France and had a second trial! Because they got it wrong the first time!
Indeed. Though the echos live today. You find quite a few “Dreyfus was guilty” types among the Le Pen Fan Club
and the Guardian
As far as I am aware, I am the only person who thinks that the real culprit was Count Otto von Schwabing disguised as Gamelin
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Apparently it's quite common for voters to say things like "I'm going to vote for the Labour because they want to stop all those immigrants".
They're in for a shock.
I wonder what percentage of voters in 1945 were unaware of WWII…
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
It was a really shit name which, in its amateurishness inadvertently signalled that it wasn't really a party, more a disgruntled band of exiles.
Political parties in democracies oughtn't to grow from the top down anyway. They should've all just jumped to the LDs. I did feel for Luciana Berger though, who received an absolute torrent of hideous abuse*.
*Esp from the Momentum dolts. I wonder what set her apart for particularly nasty treatment? It's truly a mystery.
I always find Berger's political situation odd. She was also an parachute into Liverpool Wavertree (and whose fault that is I don't know - hers for accepting, the local party for allowing it, or central office for imposing it? Or all three).
She's been Labour, LD, ChangeUK, independent and now back to Labour. Is she going to stand as an MP again next year does anyone know? Her return to Labour would suggest she might try.
Its not that odd. She wanted to be an MP, ran for seats, got selected there. Corbyn gets elected, influx of cranks, get her out. So she quits. Cranks then waste resources ensuring she doesn't win as a LibDem (you missed that stage out).
Cranks are now gone, Starmer asks her to rejoin, she's accepts the invitation. I would say something about people who quit one party for another, then attempt to go back, but I did that. Though TBH I was having a major mental health crisis at the time I attempted to rejoin Labour.
Aiui Berger's abuse came from the trots slung out by Kinnock and readmitted by Ed Miliband.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
The interesting element of all this isn't to revisit the old argument but to try and apply the changes to how politics works to the present day.
We used to debate policies, not realities. We could argue that this policy or that policy would be best for the issue, but now we seem to debate whether that issue is real or not. A post-truth alt-fact world where you don't need to actually deliver or even understand what something is as long as you can tell a lie enough times to convince people the lie is the truth.
A hard look at reality is increasingly needed to understand some basic structural problems and then have the argument about how to fix it. Instead we just have lies and arguments about patriotism if you question the lie.
A more reasoned rant against those responsible for the conduct of Brexit.
Brexit murdered“moderate” Conservatism Now it justifies the right’s stab-in-the-back myths https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/brexit-murderedmoderate-conservatism ...For understandable, if not forgivable, psychological reasons the right has embraced denial. I do not hold with the liberal-left orthodoxy that Brexit was wholly built on the back of an enormous lie. Boris Johnson lies as easily as he breathes, of course, but a few supporters of Brexit sincerely believed they would inaugurate a national renaissance. When ministers approved a policy document in January 2022 setting out how “the government will use its new freedoms to transform the UK into the best regulated economy in the world,” they were lying to themselves before all others.
Supporters of Brexit cannot believe in May 2023 what they believed in January 2022. But rather than admit to a mistake, the right retreats into a stab-in-the-back myth: the conspiracy theory of the defeated. Brexit was sabotaged by “anti-Brexit activist civil servants” (Dominic Raab), “a Europhile blob” (Daniel Hannan), and “ the objection and obstruction” of remainers (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So intoxicating is the conspiracy theory that not one leading supporter of Brexit has admitted that leaving the European Union was a mistake...
The mistake that Nick Cohen makes is to assume that "moderate" Conservatism = pro-EU. In the early Seventies, the Monday Club was split down the middle on EU membership.
Conversely, people like Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak are far more moderate than the Monday Club of the early Seventies.
Also, it assumes that full membership of the EU is the only logical and correct position and anyone who can't see that is either in denial (and will go on a journey, ultimately) or an irredeemable idiot.
There are levels of integration. To make the counterargument for a second, you could certainly argue that a single currency, and common banking and fiscal policy, would make the single market work much better and lead to a higher velocity of trade and economic growth off the back of it. In fact, I've even seen articles in the Economist argue for a global currency and global free movement on the same basis.
But, few don't accept there's a genuine political debate to be had there on the tradeoffs.
That a pretty blatant strawman argument, since none of the opposition parties is campaigning for rejoining the EU. And are therefore presumably having precisely that kind of internal debate - we'll see if that is the case when they publish their manifestos.
The point about the article I posted is that there is little of no sign of any such argument within the Conservative party. It is wedded to ploughing on.
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
We were told the Referendum was non-binding.
We were told the exact opposite.
The 2011 AV referendum was legally binding, clearly a choice was made to make the 2016 EU referendum NOT legally binding. Of course politicians promised the result would be respected, but lots of campaign promises aren't carried out. It's undemocratic but how much of a problem it is is a practical question, rather than an absolute principle that can never be broken. For example, if there had been the same result but with a very low turnout, it would have been easier for politicians to say - let's think about this again.
She probably thinks it means getting rid of her sort of role. She works fanatically hard at engagements, but is a sort of "extra".
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
You missed my edit there - Labour didn't bother because Corbyn was happy with Brexit and couldn't be arsed.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Only if you consider the median. Therese Coffey is throwing the mean off for the rest of us.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Apparently it's quite common for voters to say things like "I'm going to vote for the Labour because they want to stop all those immigrants".
They're in for a shock.
Labour are far more trusted, according to latest polling, on immigration than the Tories.
The public are clearly more receptive to labours open door rhetoric and ideas on migration.
She probably thinks it means getting rid of her sort of role. She works fanatically hard at engagement, but is a sort of "extra".
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
She probably thinks it means getting rid of her sort of role. She works fanatically hard at engagement, but is a sort of "extra".
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
Dunno. On the one hand, minor royals cost a lot of money. On the other hand, those 40 new hospitals won't open themselves.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
I'm not disputing that the 2017 parliament had the right to do what it did.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Indeed. Parliaments pass lots of bad laws that need replacing. This parliament seems to pass new border laws every year which say the law enacted the year before was useless!
Point is, that no matter how bad the law, parliament is able to pass it because it is not bound by the past. Nor even international treaties and agreements - some Tory MPs insisting we leave the ECHR as an example.
So we all agree the principle. But with demands for an exception only for the Brexit referendum, which wasn't even law. You can say that ignoring it was politically not in the right, and that is a valid argument from one perspective. But ultimately that is a political decision where every MP has to seek re-election based on their record. Somehow the Brexit referendum was deemed to be different. Overruling all other considerations and realities. The only thing that could bind parliament.
Which, when you step back from the issue and talk about the principle, is absurd.
"Somehow" = the first referendum result that politicians tried to obstruct.
The principle, of course, is that even if technically parliament is soverign, its soverignty comes as the general representatives of the people. That clearly gets overridden morally by a direct instruction in a referendum.
Imagine if, instead of specifying AV, the voting reform referendum had been "should FPTP be replaced with a system of proportional representation?" without specifying a type. Then imagine that a yes vote had been returned and years had been spent squabbling about which form of PR to implement. A further referendum on a choice between, say, AMS and STV would have been fine. But putting the rejected FPTP back on the ballot paper wouldn't have been.
Any situation where proponents of a change need to win two votes in a row to get it, whereas SQ proponents can win only one of the two is really dubious simply on the basis of balance.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
Most of the loudest Brexit-related whingeing in the last few years has come from the ERG, DUP, Farage's lot and a fair few other Tory MPs and members.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
The interesting element of all this isn't to revisit the old argument but to try and apply the changes to how politics works to the present day.
We used to debate policies, not realities. We could argue that this policy or that policy would be best for the issue, but now we seem to debate whether that issue is real or not. A post-truth alt-fact world where you don't need to actually deliver or even understand what something is as long as you can tell a lie enough times to convince people the lie is the truth.
A hard look at reality is increasingly needed to understand some basic structural problems and then have the argument about how to fix it. Instead we just have lies and arguments about patriotism if you question the lie.
The thing to remember is that a lot of people don't think so let the wrong version of a story lead which creates problem down the line.
See HS2 - it's not about Speed, the WCML, ECML and Midland Mainlines are at capacity. HS2 fixes those lines by removing the fast non stop trains which will allow more stopping trains on the existing tracks (the complexity there is explaining that trains running at multiple speeds = less trains than running them all at the same speed)
Teacher's pay - you can't increase pay without increasing School's budgets - otherwise the money to pay the teachers is coming from other parts of the school i.e. bye bye teaching assistants.
Oh great we're back on the wanting another democratic vote is not democratic bandwagon.
Excellent.
I'd go further. There should never be another vote on anything once there has already been a vote on that thing. Whether Police & Crime Commissioners, General Election, In/Out referendums, you name it.
Much more democratic that way.
Oh, great, we're back on the wilfully misrepresenting the other point of view bandwagon.
It has been said many times, perhaps by you not a few times, that having another vote on EU membership would not be democratic.
No.
It was said that having another vote in an attempt to overturn the first vote instead of implementing it would have been anti-democratic.
Having a rejoin vote now that Brexit has happened would be prefectly democratic.
Democracy: people vote, things happen, people vote again.
Not democracy: people vote, politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again".
Oh and politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again" at every General Election.
No, not really. The 2015 general election didn't reverse the 2010 general election because the 650 winners of that election became MPs for the duration of the 2010 parliament. Candidates don't have to win two elections to become MPs, no matter how egregious.
You seem to be having a problem with this. There are two issues which you seem unable to grasp.
You are talking about the same people who voted for Option A instead of Option B being asked to vote again to decide upon Option A or Option B. If you said we want a bunch of aliens to come in and vote between A & B then yes absolutely you would have a point. But it is the same people so some of those who originally voted for one option might then have decided to vote for the other. Perfectly democratic. It is never undemocratic to ask the people to vote on something. Impractical, an admin nightmare maybe, but not undemocratic.
And wrt your GE example, by your reckoning every manifesto pledge would have to be enacted before there could be another general election to choose a new government.
It's not "the same people", some die, some come of age.
It is undemocratic to say to people "we aren't going to do what you voted for, so you have to vote again and get it right this time".
At a general election, what people vote for is for the winning candidate in each constituency to become an MP. Manifestoes are officially irrelevant (R (Wheeler) v Office of the PM).
None of this is slightly difficult, you're talking yourself into knots because you won't admit that you think that getting the "right answer" on the EU is more important than democracy.
Jesus that's also democracy. You ask people to vote de temps en temps and they change their mind, become eligible to vote, die, etc.
You can't freeze in aspic any particular democratic decision. .
Oh, for fuck's sake. I AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU CAN OR SHOULD.
All I am saying is, if the people vote for something to happen, it is uindemocratic for politicians to refuse to implement it and make people vote again in lieu of implementing it.
You really aren't thick. I can't believe that you don't actually grasp my point. So why are you pretending not to?
Depends, especially if there's a biggish gap in time between the vote and the implimentation.
If, after 2016, there had been a massive lurch in public opinion of an "OMG What Have We Done This Is Clearly A Mistake" type, then it would have been mad and frankly undemocratic for the government to say "Tough luck- you voted for this, now you are going to get it, good and hard".
In this case, that lurch didn't happen, at least not quickly enough or substantially enough to really be called a lurch;
"It's a mistake" had a consistent but small lead from about summer 2018, which only really opened up from summer 2021.
I think I'd agree with you that the polling from 2018 wasn't really enough to require an "are you sure about this" second referendum. But clearly there is a threshold where it would be the democratic thing to do.
Stalling to try and get such a gap to develop doesn't seem particularly democratic to me?
What said anything about stalling?
It's implied by allowing "a biggish gap in time" - that means that the referendum losers are encouraged to stall rather than accept defeat.
She probably thinks it means getting rid of her sort of role. She works fanatically hard at engagement, but is a sort of "extra".
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
She used to be No 4 heir!
But in the slimmed-down royal familes, don't the former heirs like her rapidly take a back seat, later on in their career , if not made king or queen ?
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
Most of the loudest Brexit-related whingeing in the last few years has come from the ERG, DUP, Farage's lot and a fair few other Tory MPs and members.
Ill put that in the oh look theres a squirrel category.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
I'm not disputing that the 2017 parliament had the right to do what it did.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Indeed. Parliaments pass lots of bad laws that need replacing. This parliament seems to pass new border laws every year which say the law enacted the year before was useless!
Point is, that no matter how bad the law, parliament is able to pass it because it is not bound by the past. Nor even international treaties and agreements - some Tory MPs insisting we leave the ECHR as an example.
So we all agree the principle. But with demands for an exception only for the Brexit referendum, which wasn't even law. You can say that ignoring it was politically not in the right, and that is a valid argument from one perspective. But ultimately that is a political decision where every MP has to seek re-election based on their record. Somehow the Brexit referendum was deemed to be different. Overruling all other considerations and realities. The only thing that could bind parliament.
Which, when you step back from the issue and talk about the principle, is absurd.
"Somehow" = the first referendum result that politicians tried to obstruct.
The principle, of course, is that even if technically parliament is soverign, its soverignty comes as the general representatives of the people. That clearly gets overridden morally by a direct instruction in a referendum.
Imagine if, instead of specifying AV, the voting reform referendum had been "should FPTP be replaced with a system of proportional representation?" without specifying a type. Then imagine that a yes vote had been returned and years had been spent squabbling about which form of PR to implement. A further referendum on a choice between, say, AMS and STV would have been fine. But putting the rejected FPTP back on the ballot paper wouldn't have been.
Any situation where proponents of a change need to win two votes in a row to get it, whereas SQ proponents can win only one of the two is really dubious simply on the basis of balance.
I can fairly confidently predict that if that had happened, Cameron would have put retaining FPTP in his 2015 manifesto and then ditched the move to PR after winning his majority.
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
We were told the Referendum was non-binding.
We were told the exact opposite.
The 2011 AV referendum was legally binding, clearly a choice was made to make the 2016 EU referendum NOT legally binding. Of course politicians promised the result would be respected, but lots of campaign promises aren't carried out. It's undemocratic but how much of a problem it is is a practical question, rather than an absolute principle that can never be broken. For example, if there had been the same result but with a very low turnout, it would have been easier for politicians to say - let's think about this again.
The government said in its official information booklet that the result of the referendum would be implemented.
That wasn't a campaign pledge because it wasn't a Remain campaign leaflet.
She probably thinks it means getting rid of her sort of role. She works fanatically hard at engagement, but is a sort of "extra".
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
She used to be No 4 heir!
But in the slimmed-down royal familes, don't the former heirs like her rapidly take a back seat, later on in their career , if not made king or queen ?
Quite so, which is the procewss happening here, if rather slowly.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
Most of the loudest Brexit-related whingeing in the last few years has come from the ERG, DUP, Farage's lot and a fair few other Tory MPs and members.
Ill put that in the oh look theres a squirrel category.
You and Driver have been spotting real and imagined squirrels for the last several posts so I am noting the other ones on the tree over there.
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
We were told the Referendum was non-binding.
We were told the exact opposite.
The 2011 AV referendum was legally binding, clearly a choice was made to make the 2016 EU referendum NOT legally binding. Of course politicians promised the result would be respected, but lots of campaign promises aren't carried out. It's undemocratic but how much of a problem it is is a practical question, rather than an absolute principle that can never be broken. For example, if there had been the same result but with a very low turnout, it would have been easier for politicians to say - let's think about this again.
The government said in its official information booklet that the result of the referendum would be implemented.
That wasn't a campaign pledge because it wasn't a Remain campaign leaflet.
And what one government says cannot bind another. Basic element of the UK constitution, such as it is.
Re; the polling trend, either it will carry on narrowing, or Curtice is right ; he seems to think the evidence is showing 1997 levels of planning for tactical voting.
Why is General Election intention for the LibDems creeping up to 12%, for instance, and is some of that coming from Labour or Tory tactical switchers ?
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
Most of the loudest Brexit-related whingeing in the last few years has come from the ERG, DUP, Farage's lot and a fair few other Tory MPs and members.
Ill put that in the oh look theres a squirrel category.
You and Driver have been spotting real and imagined squirrels for the last several posts so I am noting the other ones on the tree over there.
Is it a red or grey one and does it have squirrel pox?
Oh great we're back on the wanting another democratic vote is not democratic bandwagon.
Excellent.
I'd go further. There should never be another vote on anything once there has already been a vote on that thing. Whether Police & Crime Commissioners, General Election, In/Out referendums, you name it.
Much more democratic that way.
Oh, great, we're back on the wilfully misrepresenting the other point of view bandwagon.
It has been said many times, perhaps by you not a few times, that having another vote on EU membership would not be democratic.
No.
It was said that having another vote in an attempt to overturn the first vote instead of implementing it would have been anti-democratic.
Having a rejoin vote now that Brexit has happened would be prefectly democratic.
Democracy: people vote, things happen, people vote again.
Not democracy: people vote, politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again".
Oh and politicians say "you voted the wrong way, vote again" at every General Election.
No, not really. The 2015 general election didn't reverse the 2010 general election because the 650 winners of that election became MPs for the duration of the 2010 parliament. Candidates don't have to win two elections to become MPs, no matter how egregious.
You seem to be having a problem with this. There are two issues which you seem unable to grasp.
You are talking about the same people who voted for Option A instead of Option B being asked to vote again to decide upon Option A or Option B. If you said we want a bunch of aliens to come in and vote between A & B then yes absolutely you would have a point. But it is the same people so some of those who originally voted for one option might then have decided to vote for the other. Perfectly democratic. It is never undemocratic to ask the people to vote on something. Impractical, an admin nightmare maybe, but not undemocratic.
And wrt your GE example, by your reckoning every manifesto pledge would have to be enacted before there could be another general election to choose a new government.
It's not "the same people", some die, some come of age.
It is undemocratic to say to people "we aren't going to do what you voted for, so you have to vote again and get it right this time".
At a general election, what people vote for is for the winning candidate in each constituency to become an MP. Manifestoes are officially irrelevant (R (Wheeler) v Office of the PM).
None of this is slightly difficult, you're talking yourself into knots because you won't admit that you think that getting the "right answer" on the EU is more important than democracy.
Jesus that's also democracy. You ask people to vote de temps en temps and they change their mind, become eligible to vote, die, etc.
You can't freeze in aspic any particular democratic decision. .
Oh, for fuck's sake. I AM NOT SAYING THAT YOU CAN OR SHOULD.
All I am saying is, if the people vote for something to happen, it is uindemocratic for politicians to refuse to implement it and make people vote again in lieu of implementing it.
You really aren't thick. I can't believe that you don't actually grasp my point. So why are you pretending not to?
Depends, especially if there's a biggish gap in time between the vote and the implimentation.
If, after 2016, there had been a massive lurch in public opinion of an "OMG What Have We Done This Is Clearly A Mistake" type, then it would have been mad and frankly undemocratic for the government to say "Tough luck- you voted for this, now you are going to get it, good and hard".
In this case, that lurch didn't happen, at least not quickly enough or substantially enough to really be called a lurch;
"It's a mistake" had a consistent but small lead from about summer 2018, which only really opened up from summer 2021.
I think I'd agree with you that the polling from 2018 wasn't really enough to require an "are you sure about this" second referendum. But clearly there is a threshold where it would be the democratic thing to do.
Stalling to try and get such a gap to develop doesn't seem particularly democratic to me?
What said anything about stalling?
It's implied by allowing "a biggish gap in time" - that means that the referendum losers are encouraged to stall rather than accept defeat.
Not because rearranging the way a country interacts with a large neighbour with a big rulebook is a big job that takes time to do?
I know Liam Fox talked of sorting everything out in an afternoon, but that's because he's a chump, frankly.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
I'm not disputing that the 2017 parliament had the right to do what it did.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Indeed. Parliaments pass lots of bad laws that need replacing. This parliament seems to pass new border laws every year which say the law enacted the year before was useless!
Point is, that no matter how bad the law, parliament is able to pass it because it is not bound by the past. Nor even international treaties and agreements - some Tory MPs insisting we leave the ECHR as an example.
So we all agree the principle. But with demands for an exception only for the Brexit referendum, which wasn't even law. You can say that ignoring it was politically not in the right, and that is a valid argument from one perspective. But ultimately that is a political decision where every MP has to seek re-election based on their record. Somehow the Brexit referendum was deemed to be different. Overruling all other considerations and realities. The only thing that could bind parliament.
Which, when you step back from the issue and talk about the principle, is absurd.
"Somehow" = the first referendum result that politicians tried to obstruct.
The principle, of course, is that even if technically parliament is soverign, its soverignty comes as the general representatives of the people. That clearly gets overridden morally by a direct instruction in a referendum.
Imagine if, instead of specifying AV, the voting reform referendum had been "should FPTP be replaced with a system of proportional representation?" without specifying a type. Then imagine that a yes vote had been returned and years had been spent squabbling about which form of PR to implement. A further referendum on a choice between, say, AMS and STV would have been fine. But putting the rejected FPTP back on the ballot paper wouldn't have been.
Any situation where proponents of a change need to win two votes in a row to get it, whereas SQ proponents can win only one of the two is really dubious simply on the basis of balance.
I can fairly confidently predict that if that had happened, Cameron would have put retaining FPTP in his 2015 manifesto and then ditched the move to PR after winning his majority.
Assuming he hadn't flounced after losing the referendum, no doubt. But it still would have been undemocratic.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
The interesting element of all this isn't to revisit the old argument but to try and apply the changes to how politics works to the present day.
We used to debate policies, not realities. We could argue that this policy or that policy would be best for the issue, but now we seem to debate whether that issue is real or not. A post-truth alt-fact world where you don't need to actually deliver or even understand what something is as long as you can tell a lie enough times to convince people the lie is the truth.
A hard look at reality is increasingly needed to understand some basic structural problems and then have the argument about how to fix it. Instead we just have lies and arguments about patriotism if you question the lie.
The thing to remember is that a lot of people don't think so let the wrong version of a story lead which creates problem down the line.
See HS2 - it's not about Speed, the WCML, ECML and Midland Mainlines are at capacity. HS2 fixes those lines by removing the fast non stop trains which will allow more stopping trains on the existing tracks (the complexity there is explaining that trains running at multiple speeds = less trains than running them all at the same speed)
Teacher's pay - you can't increase pay without increasing School's budgets - otherwise the money to pay the teachers is coming from other parts of the school i.e. bye bye teaching assistants.
And a lot of the time it's the journalists either wilfully or accidentally not thinking.
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
We were told the Referendum was non-binding.
We were told the exact opposite.
The 2011 AV referendum was legally binding, clearly a choice was made to make the 2016 EU referendum NOT legally binding. Of course politicians promised the result would be respected, but lots of campaign promises aren't carried out. It's undemocratic but how much of a problem it is is a practical question, rather than an absolute principle that can never be broken. For example, if there had been the same result but with a very low turnout, it would have been easier for politicians to say - let's think about this again.
The government said in its official information booklet that the result of the referendum would be implemented.
That wasn't a campaign pledge because it wasn't a Remain campaign leaflet.
And what one government says cannot bind another. Basic element of the UK constitution, such as it is.
Again, you're resorting to technicalities which is missing the point.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
She probably thinks it means getting rid of her sort of role. She works fanatically hard at engagement, but is a sort of "extra".
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
She used to be No 4 heir!
But in the slimmed-down royal familes, don't the former heirs like her rapidly take a back seat, later on in their career , if not made king or queen ?
It reminds me of the story of the Head of Latymer private school in Hammersmith, going to town on Why Free Schools Are A Terrible Idea.
The Free School in Hammersmith is literally next door to his school.
A more reasoned rant against those responsible for the conduct of Brexit.
Brexit murdered“moderate” Conservatism Now it justifies the right’s stab-in-the-back myths https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/brexit-murderedmoderate-conservatism ...For understandable, if not forgivable, psychological reasons the right has embraced denial. I do not hold with the liberal-left orthodoxy that Brexit was wholly built on the back of an enormous lie. Boris Johnson lies as easily as he breathes, of course, but a few supporters of Brexit sincerely believed they would inaugurate a national renaissance. When ministers approved a policy document in January 2022 setting out how “the government will use its new freedoms to transform the UK into the best regulated economy in the world,” they were lying to themselves before all others.
Supporters of Brexit cannot believe in May 2023 what they believed in January 2022. But rather than admit to a mistake, the right retreats into a stab-in-the-back myth: the conspiracy theory of the defeated. Brexit was sabotaged by “anti-Brexit activist civil servants” (Dominic Raab), “a Europhile blob” (Daniel Hannan), and “ the objection and obstruction” of remainers (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So intoxicating is the conspiracy theory that not one leading supporter of Brexit has admitted that leaving the European Union was a mistake...
I think it remains to be seen if it was a mistake. Short term economic damage for sure, but where will we be in 10 years, 20 years and 100 years? Its idiotic to make trade harder with a huge trading block right on your doorstep, but most who voted for Brexit imagined that future trade would be unaffected and that they were voting to leave the political institution. Now its easy to mock that, but I believed that too, and I don't consider myself a stupid person, and I also recall being told that this was possible.
I still believe that much closer alignment and easier trade is possible without re-joining, and this will happen.
Of course it was a mistake, no matter how much you're in denial. Nobody want to consider themselves stupid or to admit they made a mistake, that's human nature.
Where am I in denial? Short term hit I acknowledge. I do not know the future - perhaps you do?
And, as I have said many times, I voted remain. Did I make a mistake?
Re; the polling trend, either it will carry on narrowing, or Curtice is right ; he seems to think the evidence is showing 1997 levels of planning for tactical voting.
Why is General Election intention for the LibDems creeping up to 12%, for instance, and is some of that coming from Labour or Tory tactical switchers ?
That always seems to happen around the time of local elections though, especially when the party has otherwise been out of the limelight. National coverage renders the Lib Dems largely irrelevant day to day because they get zero publicity, but come election time there are suddenly flurries of leaflets landing on door mats and big amber diamonds appearing on posts.
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
It gets worse later when the Conservatives demand his resignation for the Gray affair. Cleverly has already hinted at that.
Although as Gray turned out to be a Labour shill who condemned the innocent Boris Johnson to an unfair defenestration should Sunak not resign himself and return the premiership to its rightful owner?
I'd be really surprised if the Sue Gray thing has the slightest effect on Lab prospects, it seems to me just the latest straw that a hopeless (in both senses) Tory party is grasping at. The fact that they might think this coukd be a 'thing' just confirms their hopelessness imo.
As someone who long ago got out of the habit of voting Labour my antennae may be off, but I think if the no policies, no principles stuff gets traction it could be damaging. Perhaps I'm just having 1997 flashbacks.
If Curtice thinks it's 1997 levels of tactical voting, as in the article below, the Tories may only be left with the question of how much damage limitation they can do, really.
Penny to take over in 2024, and bring a bit more beauty and empathy back to Tory politics.
I'd wish to hear what Curtice said, rather than what someone reported him to have said.
In Scotland, for example, tactical voting resulted in the Conservatives being wiped out in 1997. If an election were held tomorrow, it looks as if they'd get 6 or 7 MPs.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, was/is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Only if you consider the median. Therese Coffey is throwing the mean off for the rest of us.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
LOL
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, was/is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
I need to look into her stuff - this is the second time I've heard mention of her (positive mention). She's of course right - even a broad direction of travel (low tax, easy regulation vs. protectionism, self-sufficiency, high Government intervention in key sectors) would be somewhat useful. At the moment we have the Government pulling in several different directions, and that's before you even get to the Civil Service, who seem to be running the show these days.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
LOL
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
Of course.
But it’s one thing not to have a map when your boat is sailing steadily if uncertainly down the Amazon.
It’s another when you’ve deliberately shot several holes in the hull.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
It's going to come to the public sector by default as extra holiday is the only thing a council can give when there isn't money to fund a proper pay rise.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Labour didnt bother either.
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
Most of the loudest Brexit-related whingeing in the last few years has come from the ERG, DUP, Farage's lot and a fair few other Tory MPs and members.
Ill put that in the oh look theres a squirrel category.
You and Driver have been spotting real and imagined squirrels for the last several posts so I am noting the other ones on the tree over there.
Is it a red or grey one and does it have squirrel pox?
Re; the polling trend, either it will carry on narrowing, or Curtice is right ; he seems to think the evidence is showing 1997 levels of planning for tactical voting.
Why is General Election intention for the LibDems creeping up to 12%, for instance, and is some of that coming from Labour or Tory tactical switchers ?
That always seems to happen around the time of local elections though, especially when the party has otherwise been out of the limelight. National coverage renders the Lib Dems largely irrelevant day to day because they get zero publicity, but come election time there are suddenly flurries of leaflets landing on door mats and big amber diamonds appearing on posts.
With your party being so seasoned at this, though, couldn't it also be these elections will be the springboard and the test-bed for the bigger tactical exercise to come next year ? Helping to create a profile and a pattern of voting locally against the Tories, as the Lib Dems were also so good at doing in the '90s, before increasing their national voting proportion during the '90s, and helping to oust the Tories with this.
Corbyn was a follower of Tony Benn, who argued against joining the EEC back in 1975 because he didn’t think his form of a Socialist system could be brought in and implemented if we were part of the Community. And AFAIK Corbyn never changed his mind.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
One for individual companies to decide and government to forget any ideological preferences either way.
My view, for what its worth, would be standard Mon-Fri 9-5/6 will work for plenty of business, but won't be optimal for that many and companies have ended up there as a default expectation rather than analysis or design.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
LOL
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
Of course.
But it’s one thing not to have a map when your boat is sailing steadily if uncertainly down the Amazon.
It’s another when you’ve deliberately shot several holes in the hull.
The UK didnt have a map since 1992 we simply went with the flow.
Jesus that's also democracy. You ask people to vote de temps en temps and they change their mind, become eligible to vote, die, etc.
You can't freeze in aspic any particular democratic decision.
As I said I will give you impractical and an administrative nightmare but manifestly not undemocratic.
I think your insecurity about it all is slightly colouring your responses here. I am supremely relaxed. "My side" lost. But this happens all the time in politics and an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
The real problems were many:
1. The vote being 'In or Out' without any real definition of what either meant, certainly 'Out' had no plan at all as to what Out meant, but then again, neither did 'In' about their position (Status Quo Ante was just as much a lie as '£350bn for the NHS', neither was happening). Didn't help that 'In' where the government and banned from any planning for an 'Out' result either. 2. Once the vote was Out, instead of a calm - "52:48 wasn't that much of a win. 48% must support EEA therefore. I wonder if just 2% more of the Out voters would support it as well - honours the referendum (we leave) without crashing the economy." sort of discussion, we had four years of political turmoil, three Prime Ministers, two general elections and a partridge in a pear tree.... and we still crashed into the wall and nearly left without a deal at all. A lot of blame for all that goes around ALL politicians from all sides for what happened. 3. We can't really 'vote again' or 'change our mind'. We needed to implement the 2016 referendum BEFORE we could ask again. Imagine in May 1979 - Jim Callaghan steps out of No. 10 and says, "Yes, I know I lost, but lets be honest, you'll all regret Thatcherism in the 1980s, so I've decided I'm staying on for two more years and we'll ask you again in 1981. Better get it right (Vote Labour) or I'll be forced to keep asking until you do."
Doesn’t (1) contradict (3)? That is, with what “out” means being so ill-defined, there is a logic to having a confirmatory referendum asking, “OK, now we’ve defined “out” in what was an advisory referendum, is this what you want?”
Not that I see much value in this discussion. It’s water under the bridge. What matters is our relationship with the EU going forward, and indeed a million other issues, like high inflation, long NHS waiting lists, long court waiting lists, underfunded schools, declining local services, etc.
I don't support either Liverton or Everpool, but obviously being an annoying Scouser and living in Liverpool it's hard to get away from it all. The new stadium going up is hard to miss on the way to work each day either.
It'd be a shame for Everton to go down, but then again I remember the 1990s when it was constantly threatened they might then (and be replaced by Tranmere - neither happened). Perhaps it's just their time.
But they didn't lose yesterday. A defeat would've probably been a significant nail in the coffin, but whilst 19th on 29 points, there is only 1 point between them and safety and still four games to play. I haven't looked at the run in, so I don't really know but surely its possible they could string two wins together and avoid the drop?
(And this is why stopping some sort of American 'one league, no promotions or relegations allowed' is so important. Imagine how much more boring the sport would be without relegation battles as well as title battles).
It only works in the US (and Canada, a bit) because of the whole college/draft system to keep it varied and competitive.
One of many of the flaws of the European super league idea is that would likely end up being extremely dull, with whoever has the most spendthrift sugar daddy likely winning. Like so much innovation in sport (see also VAR) it misses the point of why we watch it in the first place.
On Everton, my gut feel is that they'll stay up, or at least they have as good a chance as anyone. Southampton are down and I think Forest will join them. I do generally have a moderate good will towards Everton but tbh they could do with a spell in the lower divisions.
Are we really doing the "undemocratic" thing again?
I think that parliament is sovereign and the 2017 parliament had the absolute sovereign right to do whatever the fuck it liked, including ignoring the Brexit referendum held previously.
Other posters, usually the ones who voted for Brexit to take back control of sovereignty, think there would have been a democratic deficit had a more recent general election be seen to be a newer mandate than a previous referendum.
It doesn't matter. Its all in the past.
I'm not disputing that the 2017 parliament had the right to do what it did.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Indeed. Parliaments pass lots of bad laws that need replacing. This parliament seems to pass new border laws every year which say the law enacted the year before was useless!
Point is, that no matter how bad the law, parliament is able to pass it because it is not bound by the past. Nor even international treaties and agreements - some Tory MPs insisting we leave the ECHR as an example.
So we all agree the principle. But with demands for an exception only for the Brexit referendum, which wasn't even law. You can say that ignoring it was politically not in the right, and that is a valid argument from one perspective. But ultimately that is a political decision where every MP has to seek re-election based on their record. Somehow the Brexit referendum was deemed to be different. Overruling all other considerations and realities. The only thing that could bind parliament.
Which, when you step back from the issue and talk about the principle, is absurd.
"Somehow" = the first referendum result that politicians tried to obstruct.
The principle, of course, is that even if technically parliament is soverign, its soverignty comes as the general representatives of the people. That clearly gets overridden morally by a direct instruction in a referendum.
Imagine if, instead of specifying AV, the voting reform referendum had been "should FPTP be replaced with a system of proportional representation?" without specifying a type. Then imagine that a yes vote had been returned and years had been spent squabbling about which form of PR to implement. A further referendum on a choice between, say, AMS and STV would have been fine. But putting the rejected FPTP back on the ballot paper wouldn't have been.
Any situation where proponents of a change need to win two votes in a row to get it, whereas SQ proponents can win only one of the two is really dubious simply on the basis of balance.
I can fairly confidently predict that if that had happened, Cameron would have put retaining FPTP in his 2015 manifesto and then ditched the move to PR after winning his majority.
Assuming he hadn't flounced after losing the referendum, no doubt. But it still would have been undemocratic.
Late to this and we are, I think, on opposite sides on Brexit.
But I'm broadly of your view, with the exception that - given the gridlock from 2017-2019 - one solution would have been a further referendum and I would not have objected, in that scenario, to remain afterall being one of the options. However, I would have probably done it two stage, first pick a Brexit, then put that up against Remain. My argument being that it would then be known Brexit versus Remain, rather than the nebulous Brexit versus remain, with nebulous Brexit having caused all the problems up to that point. A competent government managing to deliver Brexit should not have asked the question again. Skipping the second part (including Remain) would also have been fine with me.
I was also against the LD cancel Brexit without a referendum offer in 2019. That, although it was never going to pass, would have been shocking - to overturn a direct referendum mandate based on winning say 40% of a vote to get a government majority. Bit of a shocker, that idea, to me.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
It's going to come to the public sector by default as extra holiday is the only thing a council can give when there isn't money to fund a proper pay rise.
Most of them will be very lucky to work 4 days at present so worst case it would cost nothing and may even improve productivity
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
My co-worker does 4 days a week but she did take a reduction in pay to do this. Something I would happily do too.
Is this Shrinkflation though when in the trial businesses the salaries were not reduced in line with the hours ?
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, was/is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
I need to look into her stuff - this is the second time I've heard mention of her (positive mention). She's of course right - even a broad direction of travel (low tax, easy regulation vs. protectionism, self-sufficiency, high Government intervention in key sectors) would be somewhat useful. At the moment we have the Government pulling in several different directions, and that's before you even get to the Civil Service, who seem to be running the show these days.
I don’t know her, save that she appears to be broadly right wing. She serves on the board of Chevron, for a start.
She pretty much makes your point; and says that the UK could go “low tax” or “high regulation”, both being viable models, but with a lack of strategy now has high tax, high regulation, and a poor trading position.
Add the political volatility ensuing from Brexit and investors have run a mile.
London Irish are at risk of following Worcester Warriors and Wasps into financial meltdown after players and staff failed to receive their salaries for April.
The American consortium involved in takeover talks with the Gallagher Premiership club informed all employees in a meeting on Friday that their money would not be paid on time.
A follow-up email was sent on Sunday with assurances that confirmation of payment would be received by Monday evening in the UK, once the banks in the United States had opened for business.
However, it was an empty promise. The Times understands that no payments were made overnight, raising an all-too familiar red flag for stressed employees.
London Irish, who have £30 million of debt, are the third Premiership club this season to find themselves in this situation. Worcester and Wasps both went bust before Christmas and dropped out of the Premiership.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
It's going to come to the public sector by default as extra holiday is the only thing a council can give when there isn't money to fund a proper pay rise.
Alarmingly, a lot of jobs do seem to have 20 percent unproductive waffle that can be cut without afffecting output.
Even in manual production jobs, you have a similar argument to the one used to increase pay by keeping foreigners out; namely, invest in automation to get more productivity so employers can pay more per hour.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Think about the average person, with an IQ of 100 (or whatever, if you're not a fan of IQ ranges). The average person.
Now just think. 50% of the population are more stupid than that person........
Are those the ones who got outwitted by a bus ?
More likely the ones that believed the bus.
Can we explain why the people calling everyone else thickos couldnt get a convincing argument together or use their alleged superior intellect to convince the oiks ?
Because they didn't think it was important - hence Brexit because they let the simple stories override reality.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
The interesting element of all this isn't to revisit the old argument but to try and apply the changes to how politics works to the present day.
We used to debate policies, not realities. We could argue that this policy or that policy would be best for the issue, but now we seem to debate whether that issue is real or not. A post-truth alt-fact world where you don't need to actually deliver or even understand what something is as long as you can tell a lie enough times to convince people the lie is the truth.
A hard look at reality is increasingly needed to understand some basic structural problems and then have the argument about how to fix it. Instead we just have lies and arguments about patriotism if you question the lie.
The thing to remember is that a lot of people don't think so let the wrong version of a story lead which creates problem down the line.
See HS2 - it's not about Speed, the WCML, ECML and Midland Mainlines are at capacity. HS2 fixes those lines by removing the fast non stop trains which will allow more stopping trains on the existing tracks (the complexity there is explaining that trains running at multiple speeds = less trains than running them all at the same speed)
Teacher's pay - you can't increase pay without increasing School's budgets - otherwise the money to pay the teachers is coming from other parts of the school i.e. bye bye teaching assistants.
And a lot of the time it's the journalists either wilfully or accidentally not thinking.
I suddenly became a lot more sympathetic to the teachers' strike when I discovered that the 4.5% pay proposal the Gov brought forward was actually 0.5% funded, and 4% "from existing schools budget". The only way you'd propose anything like that is if your kids were not at the affected schools. It's quite an offensive policy.
Corbyn was a follower of Tony Benn, who argued against joining the EEC back in 1975 because he didn’t think his form of a Socialist system could be brought in and implemented if we were part of the Community. And AFAIK Corbyn never changed his mind.
And we have now escaped the shackles of the undemocratic capitalist hegemony.
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
We were told the Referendum was non-binding.
We were told the exact opposite.
The 2011 AV referendum was legally binding, clearly a choice was made to make the 2016 EU referendum NOT legally binding. Of course politicians promised the result would be respected, but lots of campaign promises aren't carried out. It's undemocratic but how much of a problem it is is a practical question, rather than an absolute principle that can never be broken. For example, if there had been the same result but with a very low turnout, it would have been easier for politicians to say - let's think about this again.
The government said in its official information booklet that the result of the referendum would be implemented.
That wasn't a campaign pledge because it wasn't a Remain campaign leaflet.
Still, Cameron resigned and May called an election without either carrying out Brexit. At which point what the 2016 government said in a booklet started losing relevance. And why didn't parliament make the EU referendum binding like the AV referendum? The intention must have been to give them some wriggle room, whatever the official booklet said.
I think it's fair to say it would have been undemocratic not to actually carry out Brexit after the referendum result. So we're probably not disagreeing. Just sometimes some people seem to say if any referendum result isn't implemented it means The End of Democracy on principle. I think it's a pity the 2019 Berlin referendum to buy out big landlords has been ignored, but I don't think it means we are now living in something like North Korea.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
LOL
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
Of course.
But it’s one thing not to have a map when your boat is sailing steadily if uncertainly down the Amazon.
It’s another when you’ve deliberately shot several holes in the hull.
The UK didnt have a map since 1992 we simply went with the flow.
Agree somewhat.
I do think there was a kind of map until 2008 when the GFC essentially destroyed the previous map/strategy/set of assumptions.
Or course you and I would argue that the map was flawed anyway, given Britain’s trade balance and runaway house prices…
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
The 4 days idea is (generally) do 40 hours in 4 days. Then spread the days that people do to cover the 5 day week.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
LOL
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
Of course.
But it’s one thing not to have a map when your boat is sailing steadily if uncertainly down the Amazon.
It’s another when you’ve deliberately shot several holes in the hull.
The UK didnt have a map since 1992 we simply went with the flow.
Agree somewhat.
I do think there was a kind of map until 2008 when the GFC essentially destroyed the previous map/strategy/set of assumptions.
Or course you and I would argue that the map was flawed anyway, given Britain’s trade balance and runaway house prices…
I agree with that. There's a big difference between "no strategy, no plan, buffeted this way and that" and "pursuing a policy that I don't agree with".
I'd rather have the latter than the former.
ETA: [And when the wheels came off in 1992, we *did* pursue a new policy based on strategy and assumptions that worked rather well for a decade or so, across the KC & GB chancellorships]
ETA again: [It was only when the strategy changed in ~2002 with GB's eternal growth fantasy that I started to disagree with it; but it was still a strategy]
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
LOL
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
Of course.
But it’s one thing not to have a map when your boat is sailing steadily if uncertainly down the Amazon.
It’s another when you’ve deliberately shot several holes in the hull.
The UK didnt have a map since 1992 we simply went with the flow.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
My co-worker does 4 days a week but she did take a reduction in pay to do this. Something I would happily do too.
Is this Shrinkflation though when in the trial businesses the salaries were not reduced in line with the hours ?
One of my colleagues dropped down to 4 days, for a 20% pay cut/ However, there seemed to be no reduction in their workload, so have gone back to 5 days and back onto full pay.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, was/is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
It is already happening
Dropbox laying off 500 people and replacing them with AI
IBM pausing hiring for 7,800 roles that can be done by AI.
There was a business recently, forget the name, main service was support to students studying. Began with a C, cannot remember the name. The share price got walloped as the number of students signing up has tumbled as they are using AI.
About this @Leon is right, this is going to be huge.
A more reasoned rant against those responsible for the conduct of Brexit.
Brexit murdered“moderate” Conservatism Now it justifies the right’s stab-in-the-back myths https://nickcohen.substack.com/p/brexit-murderedmoderate-conservatism ...For understandable, if not forgivable, psychological reasons the right has embraced denial. I do not hold with the liberal-left orthodoxy that Brexit was wholly built on the back of an enormous lie. Boris Johnson lies as easily as he breathes, of course, but a few supporters of Brexit sincerely believed they would inaugurate a national renaissance. When ministers approved a policy document in January 2022 setting out how “the government will use its new freedoms to transform the UK into the best regulated economy in the world,” they were lying to themselves before all others.
Supporters of Brexit cannot believe in May 2023 what they believed in January 2022. But rather than admit to a mistake, the right retreats into a stab-in-the-back myth: the conspiracy theory of the defeated. Brexit was sabotaged by “anti-Brexit activist civil servants” (Dominic Raab), “a Europhile blob” (Daniel Hannan), and “ the objection and obstruction” of remainers (Jacob Rees-Mogg).
So intoxicating is the conspiracy theory that not one leading supporter of Brexit has admitted that leaving the European Union was a mistake...
I think it remains to be seen if it was a mistake. Short term economic damage for sure, but where will we be in 10 years, 20 years and 100 years? Its idiotic to make trade harder with a huge trading block right on your doorstep, but most who voted for Brexit imagined that future trade would be unaffected and that they were voting to leave the political institution. Now its easy to mock that, but I believed that too, and I don't consider myself a stupid person, and I also recall being told that this was possible.
I still believe that much closer alignment and easier trade is possible without re-joining, and this will happen.
Of course it was a mistake, no matter how much you're in denial. Nobody want to consider themselves stupid or to admit they made a mistake, that's human nature.
Where am I in denial? Short term hit I acknowledge. I do not know the future - perhaps you do?
And, as I have said many times, I voted remain. Did I make a mistake?
Sorry, you voted Remain so you're not in denial. But how should I describe someone who thinks now that "it remains to be seen if it was a mistake." Don't we have enough data already?
an EU Referendum is no different from any other democratic vote. You seem to think that it is.
It was - because it's the first vote I can recall in British history where a significant number of politicians have tried to overturn it instead of following their instructions from the people.
(Only in British history, though. The EU are past masters of this particular game, which is one of the reasons Leave won in the first place.)
Rubbish.
Sorry, no, that's exactly what happened. Large numbers of MPs were disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum.
We were told the Referendum was non-binding.
We were told the exact opposite.
The 2011 AV referendum was legally binding, clearly a choice was made to make the 2016 EU referendum NOT legally binding. Of course politicians promised the result would be respected, but lots of campaign promises aren't carried out. It's undemocratic but how much of a problem it is is a practical question, rather than an absolute principle that can never be broken. For example, if there had been the same result but with a very low turnout, it would have been easier for politicians to say - let's think about this again.
The government said in its official information booklet that the result of the referendum would be implemented.
That wasn't a campaign pledge because it wasn't a Remain campaign leaflet.
And what one government says cannot bind another. Basic element of the UK constitution, such as it is.
Again, you're resorting to technicalities which is missing the point.
The point is the EUref was non-binding, as per the legislation passed by our democratically elected HoC. The government chose to commit to respect the outcome, which was their prerogative, but the legislation defined it as non-binding so neither MPs nor the government would have been breaking the law had they ignored it.
Those MPs 'disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum' were doing their job, which is to govern in what they believe to be the best interests of their constituents and the country.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
The 4 days idea is (generally) do 40 hours in 4 days. Then spread the days that people do to cover the 5 day week.
I've done compressed working, it's good every few weeks, but long term it breaks you.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
The 4 days idea is (generally) do 40 hours in 4 days. Then spread the days that people do to cover the 5 day week.
Average full time working week is 36.5 hours. So would expect most common 4 day weeks will be 4x9 or 4x8.5 rather than 4 x 10.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
The 4 days idea is (generally) do 40 hours in 4 days. Then spread the days that people do to cover the 5 day week.
35 hours would be the usual spread.
What we will see is a reduction to a 35 hour week (without a change in workload) followed by a switch to that 4 day week of 9ish hour days.
On the latest (Brexity) Merryn Somerset Webb podcast, the economist Dambisa Moyo says that everywhere is a bit screwed, but that Britain is just extra screwed because of Brexit.
The main crime, in her opinion, was/is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
It is already happening
Dropbox laying off 500 people and replacing them with AI
IBM pausing hiring for 7,800 roles that can be done by AI.
There was a business recently, forget the name, main service was support to students studying. Began with a C, cannot remember the name. The share price got walloped as the number of students signing up has tumbled as they are using AI.
About this @Leon is right, this is going to be huge.
And, as I've been harping on about for a while - it is make-work middle class non-jobs that are going to be hit. So "the most likely to vote".
I’m just short of ten miles into today’s trek, with about thirteen more to go (haven’t booked a room for tonight yet, so not sure). Quimper, where I stayed last night, was another beautiful and interesting city, though almost certainly less vibrant than usual due to it being May Day. The emptiness of the square around the cathedral was a bonus as a result
About three quarters of the restaurants were shut, but I found a nice crêperie (at the end of Salt Street, on Butter Place!) where I had a really quite delicious scallop galette. The sauce was superb: cream, garlic, shallots, mushrooms and cidre, and washed down with another bottle of wine
Today’s walk has probably been the toughest yet; I’ve been over five pretty big hills already, it’s much hotter today and there’s far less shade. I’m taking a few more breaks than usual, but keeping on going..
I still have no blisters on my feet, but have had three on my left ear from the sun that have burst and turned into scabs. Hopefully now I’m into the northern part of the walk I’ll get some on my right ear to balance them out!
Former BBC journalist, who left to become a reparations campaigner, whose family have made reparations to Grenada for their impact on slavery, a modest amount compared to their wealth, is now facing demands, and refusing, to pay reparations for her ancestors role in the Irish Famine.
Interesting this. Once this Pandora's box is opened, who know where it goes.
So what do people make of this trend, being pushed by those on the left of politics, for a 4 day working week with no loss of pay.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
Ultimately market forces will determine working practices and pay. I see this as the pay equivalent of shrinkflation. The shrinkflation phenomenon involving brands reducing the size of their products (usually confectionary) instead of increasing the price. This is the employment equivalent.
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
The 4 days idea is (generally) do 40 hours in 4 days. Then spread the days that people do to cover the 5 day week.
I've done compressed working, it's good every few weeks, but long term it breaks you.
Particularly when a shit show happens on day 5.
But is this compressed working as being implemented now.
its advocates are talking of it in terms of reducing waste and needless activities that would otherwise fill a week rather than doing 5 days work in 4 days.
Effectively this is not going from 40 hours in 5 days to 40 hours in 4 days. It is going to 32 hours in 4 days. So 20% of what was done before, or 10-15% assuming productivity improves, must no longer need to be done.
"I tend to regard LAB voting intention to signify being anti-Tory and that people will vote in their elections for the party locally they perceive as being most likely to beat the Conservatives".
I'm sure that's correct. The problem most people seem to have is knowing which party in their ward has most chance of causing hurt to the Tories. Surprisingly few seem to even know which party is currently in charge.
Voters are generally not very clever. Most have no idea who their MP is, nor which party they represent. I wonder how many have no idea whether the Govt is Tory or Labour ?
Apparently it's quite common for voters to say things like "I'm going to vote for the Labour because they want to stop all those immigrants".
They're in for a shock.
Nearly 100 a day arriving by small boats each day at the moment.
Comments
Comparing GE opinion polls to NEV calculations is comparing apples to armchairs. LDs always have a big boost in NEV calculations versus opinion polls (which is why anyone extrapolating the NEV share coming out of here directly to a General Election will be as misleading in the other direction, but some media commentators are bound to do just that).
Which puts you above pretty well the entire cabinet.
I don't expect much progress on the last bit without a change of government.
We can disagree with the decisions made and the laws implemented. But either parliament is sovereign or it is not. I find it baffling that the people who demanded sovereignty for our parliament say "but not on this issue".
Anyway, the quickly receding past. The future is "I know we said we wouldn't look for closer ties with the EU, but since taking office we have been shocked to find out just how much of a mess we are in". And other such lies.
But having the right to do something doesn't necessarily mean being in the right if you do it.
Ofcourse, in reality it was an epochal clash between emergent modernity and anti-semitic, clericalist reaction in France, as all Sun readers know.
I’d rather we rejoined properly.
Now remaining in the EU needed some explaining (and was a hard sell given how shat upon many working class people have found things since the EU borders opened in 2007) but Cameron and Co didn't even bother because they didn't think it was important.
Result Brexit...
Edit to add - I suspect the election of Corbyn who seems to have been quietly in favour of Brexit didn't help the Remain cause because Labour didn't really provide a united front with the Tories on why remain was a good idea. So Brexit is all Ed Milband's "£3 gets you a vote" fault.
Point is, that no matter how bad the law, parliament is able to pass it because it is not bound by the past. Nor even international treaties and agreements - some Tory MPs insisting we leave the ECHR as an example.
So we all agree the principle. But with demands for an exception only for the Brexit referendum, which wasn't even law. You can say that ignoring it was politically not in the right, and that is a valid argument from one perspective. But ultimately that is a political decision where every MP has to seek re-election based on their record. Somehow the Brexit referendum was deemed to be different. Overruling all other considerations and realities. The only thing that could bind parliament.
Which, when you step back from the issue and talk about the principle, is absurd.
Accept Mays deal now
Carry on negotiating for up to another year at which point have another GE if can't get anywhere.
"Princess Anne, the 16th in line to the British throne, has said she does not think a slimmed-down monarchy is a “good idea”."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/may/02/princess-anne-slimmed-down-royal-family-doesnt-sound-like-a-good-idea
All I'm saying is that, had the public view shifted a lot between vote and implimentation, it would have been more democratic to stop the process rather than going through with something that the voters of 2016 had wanted but the voters of (2016 + a bit) didn't.
I don't think we got to that scenario, but it was certainly a possibility. And if you think of democracy as an imperfect but sincere attempt to move the country in the way the country wants, rather than a debate game with a winner who gets a prize, you have to allow for that possibility. And if people are willing to run the risk of becoming unpopular by continuing to argue a case they believe in, why should anyone stop them?
So basically youre saying Remain couldnt get their shit together.
And now theyve spent seven years whingeing over their own stupidity
We used to debate policies, not realities. We could argue that this policy or that policy would be best for the issue, but now we seem to debate whether that issue is real or not. A post-truth alt-fact world where you don't need to actually deliver or even understand what something is as long as you can tell a lie enough times to convince people the lie is the truth.
A hard look at reality is increasingly needed to understand some basic structural problems and then have the argument about how to fix it. Instead we just have lies and arguments about patriotism if you question the lie.
The point about the article I posted is that there is little of no sign of any such argument within the Conservative party. It is wedded to ploughing on.
In the long-term, Chazza's right. Most people, including even ardent monarchists, think they need to be more like the Scandinavian monarchies size, cost and official image, according to various polls and surveys, that I've seen here and there.
Hence I'm blaming Ed Miliband for Brexit...
The public are clearly more receptive to labours open door rhetoric and ideas on migration.
The principle, of course, is that even if technically parliament is soverign, its soverignty comes as the general representatives of the people. That clearly gets overridden morally by a direct instruction in a referendum.
Imagine if, instead of specifying AV, the voting reform referendum had been "should FPTP be replaced with a system of proportional representation?" without specifying a type. Then imagine that a yes vote had been returned and years had been spent squabbling about which form of PR to implement. A further referendum on a choice between, say, AMS and STV would have been fine. But putting the rejected FPTP back on the ballot paper wouldn't have been.
Any situation where proponents of a change need to win two votes in a row to get it, whereas SQ proponents can win only one of the two is really dubious simply on the basis of balance.
See HS2 - it's not about Speed, the WCML, ECML and Midland Mainlines are at capacity. HS2 fixes those lines by removing the fast non stop trains which will allow more stopping trains on the existing tracks (the complexity there is explaining that trains running at multiple speeds = less trains than running them all at the same speed)
Teacher's pay - you can't increase pay without increasing School's budgets - otherwise the money to pay the teachers is coming from other parts of the school i.e. bye bye teaching assistants.
That wasn't a campaign pledge because it wasn't a Remain campaign leaflet.
Why is General Election intention for the LibDems creeping up to 12%, for instance, and is some of that coming from Labour or Tory tactical switchers ?
I know Liam Fox talked of sorting everything out in an afternoon, but that's because he's a chump, frankly.
It seems to be a success in many businesses although those judging it are, effectively, marking their own homework as they are often the advocates of it.
Quite frankly I would be delighted if my workplace adopted it. I shall send it to HR to consider as part of the negotiations this year.
It is hard to see how, where a job is manual labour, where this can work. If you can produce 100 widgets an hour from a machine you cannot suddenly produce 125 an hour to make up for the operator not being there. If that was the case it would have been done previously to recover more overheads on the asset.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/south-cambridgeshire-council-s-four-day-work-week-trial-hailed-a-success/ar-AA1aA9yu
The Free School in Hammersmith is literally next door to his school.
And, as I have said many times, I voted remain. Did I make a mistake?
The main crime, in her opinion, was/is the lack of any coherent economic strategy for the country.
(She’s also quite worried about the likely job losses coming around the corner from AI.)
Many in my field work 4 days a week anyway, and those who have sought after skills are earning what someone else might get for 5 days.
I do wonder if cultural desires will alter the way things proceed, though, with a by humans-for humans approach taken by some firms.
the UK didnt have a coherent economic strartegy while we were in the EU plus ca change
But it’s one thing not to have a map when your boat is sailing steadily if uncertainly down the Amazon.
It’s another when you’ve deliberately shot several holes in the hull.
And AFAIK Corbyn never changed his mind.
My view, for what its worth, would be standard Mon-Fri 9-5/6 will work for plenty of business, but won't be optimal for that many and companies have ended up there as a default expectation rather than analysis or design.
Not that I see much value in this discussion. It’s water under the bridge. What matters is our relationship with the EU going forward, and indeed a million other issues, like high inflation, long NHS waiting lists, long court waiting lists, underfunded schools, declining local services, etc.
One of many of the flaws of the European super league idea is that would likely end up being extremely dull, with whoever has the most spendthrift sugar daddy likely winning. Like so much innovation in sport (see also VAR) it misses the point of why we watch it in the first place.
On Everton, my gut feel is that they'll stay up, or at least they have as good a chance as anyone. Southampton are down and I think Forest will join them. I do generally have a moderate good will towards Everton but tbh they could do with a spell in the lower divisions.
But I'm broadly of your view, with the exception that - given the gridlock from 2017-2019 - one solution would have been a further referendum and I would not have objected, in that scenario, to remain afterall being one of the options. However, I would have probably done it two stage, first pick a Brexit, then put that up against Remain. My argument being that it would then be known Brexit versus Remain, rather than the nebulous Brexit versus remain, with nebulous Brexit having caused all the problems up to that point. A competent government managing to deliver Brexit should not have asked the question again. Skipping the second part (including Remain) would also have been fine with me.
I was also against the LD cancel Brexit without a referendum offer in 2019. That, although it was never going to pass, would have been shocking - to overturn a direct referendum mandate based on winning say 40% of a vote to get a government majority. Bit of a shocker, that idea, to me.
Is this Shrinkflation though when in the trial businesses the salaries were not reduced in line with the hours ?
She pretty much makes your point; and says that the UK could go “low tax” or “high regulation”, both being viable models, but with a lack of strategy now has high tax, high regulation, and a poor trading position.
Add the political volatility ensuing from Brexit and investors have run a mile.
The American consortium involved in takeover talks with the Gallagher Premiership club informed all employees in a meeting on Friday that their money would not be paid on time.
A follow-up email was sent on Sunday with assurances that confirmation of payment would be received by Monday evening in the UK, once the banks in the United States had opened for business.
However, it was an empty promise. The Times understands that no payments were made overnight, raising an all-too familiar red flag for stressed employees.
London Irish, who have £30 million of debt, are the third Premiership club this season to find themselves in this situation. Worcester and Wasps both went bust before Christmas and dropped out of the Premiership.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/london-irish-at-risk-of-financial-meltdown-5fnj67nsg
Even in manual production jobs, you have a similar argument to the one used to increase pay by keeping foreigners out; namely, invest in automation to get more productivity so employers can pay more per hour.
So happy days.
I think it's fair to say it would have been undemocratic not to actually carry out Brexit after the referendum result. So we're probably not disagreeing. Just sometimes some people seem to say if any referendum result isn't implemented it means The End of Democracy on principle. I think it's a pity the 2019 Berlin referendum to buy out big landlords has been ignored, but I don't think it means we are now living in something like North Korea.
I do think there was a kind of map until 2008 when the GFC essentially destroyed the previous map/strategy/set of assumptions.
Or course you and I would argue that the map was flawed anyway, given Britain’s trade balance and runaway house prices…
I'd rather have the latter than the former.
ETA: [And when the wheels came off in 1992, we *did* pursue a new policy based on strategy and assumptions that worked rather well for a decade or so, across the KC & GB chancellorships]
ETA again: [It was only when the strategy changed in ~2002 with GB's eternal growth fantasy that I started to disagree with it; but it was still a strategy]
American firms also enjoy a larger domestic market, cheaper energy prices, and a culture of opportunity.
Dropbox laying off 500 people and replacing them with AI
IBM pausing hiring for 7,800 roles that can be done by AI.
There was a business recently, forget the name, main service was support to students studying. Began with a C, cannot remember the name. The share price got walloped as the number of students signing up has tumbled as they are using AI.
About this @Leon is right, this is going to be huge.
Those MPs 'disobeying a direct instruction from the referendum' were doing their job, which is to govern in what they believe to be the best interests of their constituents and the country.
Particularly when a shit show happens on day 5.
What we will see is a reduction to a 35 hour week (without a change in workload) followed by a switch to that 4 day week of 9ish hour days.
Or is it just assumed...
About three quarters of the restaurants were shut, but I found a nice crêperie (at the end of Salt Street, on Butter Place!) where I had a really quite delicious scallop galette. The sauce was superb: cream, garlic, shallots, mushrooms and cidre, and washed down with another bottle of wine
Today’s walk has probably been the toughest yet; I’ve been over five pretty big hills already, it’s much hotter today and there’s far less shade. I’m taking a few more breaks than usual, but keeping on going..
I still have no blisters on my feet, but have had three on my left ear from the sun that have burst and turned into scabs. Hopefully now I’m into the northern part of the walk I’ll get some on my right ear to balance them out!
Interesting this. Once this Pandora's box is opened, who know where it goes.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/ex-bbc-journalist-urged-to-pay-reparations-for-ancestor-s-role-in-irish-famine/ar-AA1aBfIj?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=514863f7b6d04e9a932afb6cf55d4312&ei=10
its advocates are talking of it in terms of reducing waste and needless activities that would otherwise fill a week rather than doing 5 days work in 4 days.
Effectively this is not going from 40 hours in 5 days to 40 hours in 4 days. It is going to 32 hours in 4 days. So 20% of what was done before, or 10-15% assuming productivity improves, must no longer need to be done.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migrants-detected-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats/migrants-detected-crossing-the-english-channel-in-small-boats-last-7-days
We were assured by PB Tories that the threat of Rwanda would stop the boats.
I assume the monarch is legally allowed to vote but probably doesn't out of politeness to our err unwritten constitution.