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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Why the Brexit divisions are here to stay
When you stop and think about it, voting is a very low information form of communication. We get nothing about the certainty of the voter’s view, nothing about the enthusiasm of the voter, nothing about the considerations that led the voter to that view. All we get is a single recorded choice.
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There. Are. No. New. Words.........
If we leave, I expect support for Rejoin to be 20-30% of the electorate for the foreseeable future. Enough to cause a lot of noise, and possibly capture the Labour Party, but not enough for an election-winning majority.
If we Remain after a second referendum, I would expect support for Leave to settle around 40% before declining in future years. The sense that victory has been stolen will make the process of reconciliation slower.
If we Remain without a referendum, all bets are off.
But the trick is to use them in a different order.
I will have a bash and revert.
I don't see it like that at all. The Government's behaviour was appalling, its conduct in refusing to publicise its legal advice on the deal was appalling. Bercow's conduct here was appalling, his own refusal to publicise his clerks' advice also appalling.
Bercow's actions are arguably much more harmful - the government can (and will in my view) be voted out but Bercow has politicised the Speaker's role forever. From now on any speaker has the right to choose which amendments to advance and which to ignore regardless of the legal advice because Bercow has set the precedent.
The fact that allowing Grieve's amendment may have righted a wrong caused by the Government in delaying the vote is irrelevant. Parliament is a rules based organisation, and precedent is extremely important in rules based organisation - therefore breaking one rule to correct the breaking of another rule will make things far worse in the long run.
I am constantly amazed at how often this is overlooked, especially by those seeking to remain in the EU.
The net result is that Parliament has been treated shamefully in this episode, by the government in its initial actions, by Bercow in making up the rules against advice, and by the labour party and tory ultra-remainers in refusing to investigate perfectly credible bullying claims against Bercow because, get this, the entirely impartial speaker will help thwart Brexit - thanks for the clear explanation Margaret.. In fact, it appears now that Parliament can decide whether to investigate its own depending on personal whim (how's that Keith Vaz investigation going while a cabinet minister was hounded to resign because he touched someone's knee 20 years ago?).
I do not know what will happen with Brexit, but whatever the end result is, Parliament has been irrevocably damaged by the petty self interest of all sides. Where that leads is a very worrying conversation indeed
Yes, in the sense that 'Brexit' has coarsened and spiced up our politics, and I can see the new tone being here to stay for a long time.
No, in that I do not believe Brexit itself will persist as the dominant dividing issue once we have ratified the Withdrawal Treaty and left the EU.
Although with a caveat to that last, which is that we set sail for a closely aligned EU relationship in the FTA talks, and achieve that.
In which case I think the issue is over, apart from the real extremists on either side who see it as a war to be won and the other lot as enemies to be ground into dust.
[runs for the exit]
If triangulating between one view and another is not going to work with voters, then there is an argument for saying that MPs may as well vote for what they believe in and then explain themselves to voters honestly. And take the consequences at the next election. Rather than all this disingenuous "well I don't agree but we have to honour the vote" blarney we're getting.
MPs voted a year ago to leave the EU without a deal. For them now to say that there is no majority for this and therefore there need to be all these procedural shenanigans to get to some alternative destination is the cowardly way out. If they genuinely think that leaving without a deal is the wrong thing to do then they should vote for the only thing that Parliament can do, without the consent of others i.e. revocation, explain why to the voters and then do what should have been done before the Act was enacted on i.e. spell out the options available in the real world, the trade offs, the consequences, what the EU in reality has offered and what it means and either have a GE or a referendum. Or, sod it, make a Parliamentary decision.
Personally, while I am worried about a no deal Brexit and its consequences, I don't feel that my views on this topic are central to my identity in the way that the polls quoted by Mr Meeks seem to suggest others are. I do feel sad that Britain is dealing with a really important decision in such a cack-handed and amateurish way. That annoys me even more than the actual result. There was, potentially, a grown up way of dealing with Brexit. It has not been the one chosen.
No. There are new words!
?
Why we will remain divided is that remain/leave has given focus to a political divide that's been festering since the 70s but largely stayed hidden as it didn't fit neatly within the two parties.
Confusionism is different. It's the national religion of the UK at present.
Far better if we could have 10 years of house price stagnation.
https://twitter.com/graemearcher/status/1084004942464147456?s=21
The thread comments so far seem long on wishful thinking and short on actual evidence supporting it.
I'd rather have had a second referendum now - but it would have been a horrible experience and it would have been even more divisive than the first one. And that was bad enough.
Still hoping something will turn up that solves the issue, though I've no idea what it might be.
Do you want to risk a collapse of the U.K. party system, and the rise of the far right? Do you want civil disorder? Do you want more MPs to be killed? All this and more could result from a unilateral revocation.
PS For those who would say that considering the above is giving into intimidation, I hope you adopt the same attitude with the risk of dissident republican violence in Northern Ireland from a No Deal Brexit.
Theresa May and Philip Hammond, whatever their faults, are the one frail barrier that stand between us and total meltdown. Sadly for us and for them, the meltdown is now being forced on them by he unholiest alliance imaginable of a hard left inadequate, centrist unreconciled Europhiles, and the hard right Eursoceptics of their own party, who are about to deliver no deal.
We get the politicians we deserve. Boy, have we done something bad as a nation.
I suspect history will judge him kindly tbh - principled and effective, he seems to be running rings around the government's business managers.
One that springs to mind is a new verb for what parliament will have done to the 2016 referendum when it decides for reasons that are quite genuinely in the national interest to revoke article 50 and cancel Brexit.
All of the usual suspects - ignore, dishonour, renege on, disrespect, trash - are inappropriate because they imply malignity.
We need a brand new addition to the lexicon. Working on it but, as yet, no breakthrough.
Lower house prices are not a bug of brexit, they are a feature.
A worrying feature for those of us with large mortgages, but an absolute boon to the huge numbers of people who've seen the housing ladder slip away from them in the last fifteen years or so, the fault of successive Conservative and Labour governments.
Outside of a few outlying areas, usually low income, low job opportunity areas, I doubt you would be able to buy a family sized home for less than 250k these days. You might get a one or two bed flat, but how are you going to start a family and raise kids in that?
And the thought of saving for a 25k deposit while you're paying through the nose to rent some grotty little place? A laughable idea to many renters.
Having said that, 'revocation without a further referendum or GE' would imo be untenable; I am not sure anyone is seriously suggesting it though.
I'll be honest - I don't talk politics much outside this forum and compared to some posters I don't talk that much about it here either. The effects of the 1975 Referendum weren't long lasting - were they a factor in the rise of Margaret Thatcher? It's hard to argue for their significance given everything else going on at the time.
Perhaps 2016 will come to be viewed in the same way further down the line as a contributory event along with events of greater significance to promote the zeitgeist of the 2020s.
Too many people in the country don’t benefit and haven’t benefitted from Britain’s EU membership That’s evident to anyone who travels around the country. The immigration apartheid required by freedom of movement was huge too but it wouldn’t have had the same effect if membership was benefitting all parts of the country.
The surprising thing is that deprivation in our society is most keenly felt in our inner cities who, with the exception of Birmingham (just), voted strongly for Remain. They don’t benefit from EU membership either and presumably don’t care.
Hardly surprising therefore that no one has constructed a deal to satisfy the majority. The Remainers driving Brexit don’t want Brexit and want to stay as close to the EU as possible, even to the extent of giving the EU carte blanche to run our economy afterwards. Neither they nor the Leave supporting MPs have the slightest idea of what they want from Brexit or how they want move forward if it becomes a reality. That is a sad inditement on the intellectual inadequacy of British politics.
Small wonder that Remainers who hold democracy in contempt like Grieve, Soubry, Greening etc are being allowed to stop Brexit in its tracks.
That view is now obsolete. We find our MPs in three camps
- the 'well I was always just going to tell you, and you'd better agree'
- the 'don't change anything, it's the 'gravy train''
- the 'i think i need to do my job'
Most MPs are in the second category. Quite a few are in the first, including many people we'd have hoped might have done a good job but haven't.
Some, very few, are in the latter band.
Theresa May is, Rory Stewart is, and oddly Ken Clarke is. I can't think of others, I'm sure there are a few. However many MPs are stuck in the first camp - Yvette Cooper is a great example as she's just using her undoubted skills to fight against reality. There's no hope of rescuing the 'gravy train' mob.
Given that the slightest disruption in "normal" circumstances can lead to major problems. Such as large numbers of people being stranded in snowbound trains in adverse weather conditions, or even larger numbers of people not being able to buy anything owing to relatively minor software glitches.
Capitalism is a great mechanism for optimising things in normal circumstances, but there's very little incentive for it to produce robustness against extreme circumstances.
My parents bought their first house for £500 in 1956 (£20,000 now).
Houses depreciated then, i.e. valuers and buyers were more realistic.
A quick way to look foolish is to generalise about house prices.
Any news on that source for Grieve announcing his retirement?
This is why the current party system is not answering the questions as Mr Meeks correctly IMV says, on this issue it is more than how much welfare spending do you want. It fundamentally is who do you want to control the welfare spending.
It will not go away because the beliefs are deeply held. Look at Irish unification, Scottish independence, Catalonia. Same basic belief systems.
What drives me is a Skoda Octavia.
What drives Sunil is on rails - but then he's an unabashed Leaver so is hardly germane to this discussion.
*without a bullet fired, apparently.
So instead of this situation being an unstable position it looks like it could solidify.
However, post Brexit surely the rich will return to voting Conservative and the less rich return to voting Labour?
That’s 17,400 people. I would expect several MPs to pay the ultimate price.
Remainers tend be younger, better educated and more liberal. All are classic proxies for openness to change.
1. Sovereignty was one of the reasons for the Leave vote. We have been a Parliamentary democracy for ages. A little absurd to say that the Leave vote wasn't, in part, about giving Parliament powers some felt had been wrongly given up the EU.
2. The UK party system is at risk of collapsing now. The Tories seem to have de facto split already. Labour is split between a coterie around the leader & some of its voters & its MPs. It may be no bad thing for there to be a realignment in British politics. I don't think that the viability of the current UK party system is above all other considerations.
3. No - of course I don't want civil disorder or MPs to be killed. No-one does. But you downplay the risk of civil disorder if there is a no deal Brexit &, say, a serious recession, with voters then saying that this was not what they voted for.
4. Do I want the rise of the far right? No - nor do I want the rise of the far Left; but the main opposition party is now in its hands. A no deal Brexit would likely provide a fertile ground for the far Left to do its worst, one reason why the Labour leadership is unwilling to come up with a sensible policy. It might well embolden the far right. If Nazis or Commies start stalking the land we confront them. Not run away. We certainly don't inflict economic hardship on people without trying to find an alternative.
Revocation, as I have said ad nauseam, maintains the status quo. It buys the country much needed time for the country to come to a considered view about what it wants to do, knowing now what withdrawal deal is on offer from the EU, given the red lines May has laid down. It gives the country time to decide whether it agrees with those &, if not, change them. It gives time to prepare. And it gives the country the opportunity to decide whether it really wants to go ahead with the decision it took nearly three years ago.
The plain fact is that, as far as we can tell, there is no settled view in Parliament about how to leave. There isn't even a settled view on this in Cabinet, for God's sake. So pressing the Pause button, taking a deep breath & thinking again - & hard - is not some evil plot against the voters or against democracy. It may well be the least worst option. If the settled view is for leave then let's try & do it like grown ups. Leaving may well be a mistake (or not). But we could earn some credit by the manner of our departure. We are not currently doing so.
The more Leavers bang on about the referendum & set their face against another referendum, the more I wonder whether some of them are doing so because they are worried that were the voters to look again at their decision in the light of what we now know they might change their mind.
Nothing is easy here. I'll admit.
Edit - incidentally, unless you have very substantial savings, you will not get a sufficient mortgage for a 190k house on much less than a £50k salary.
And by 'substantial' I mean roughly £100k.
Not sure about your last para though. Scotland, Catalonia, United Ireland, they are movements to achieve nation state status for a territory or people who consider that they should be one. That IMO is different to the other point, which is about the balance of power & responsibilities between the nation state and supranational bodies.
Your “commentary” reminds me why Remainers cannot reconcile themselves to Leaverdom (which at heart is a nihilist, anti-rationalist revolt steeped in nostalgia).
The young are better educated and more liberal, so you're just saying Remainers tend to be young.
Personally I think older people don't like the promised land turning out to be full of unpromising souls such as Juncker - we don't need the EU for that, we're world leaders in produce our own dross.
Not sure therefore there was anything crazy.
You really know very little, one can only assume you haven’t met one of these “Remainers”. Or none who would admit to you, anyway.
Your comments reek of why Remain lost.
I think part of the problem is that it's uncertain about its future direction - does it go for full federation as its politicians desire, or for a full trading arrangement that the people desire without the political rubbish (again, we would get this under the withdrawal agreement, which is even more frustrating)?
It will soon face a moment of truth, but I am worried not only is it ill-equipped to deal with it but our departure removes one of the potential influences to moderate it.
Remainers were better educated, even allowing for the age effect.
This partly helps explains why they were able to see through the fake claims of Leave.
Mind you I like party rebels (well most of them) so hope she doesn't.