EU Vote

[Robert]

The end for Juncker :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo65ZGbg7sg

[Pcdunn]

I would be extremely surprised. Even they wouldn't do that.

Thank you, Fleetwood Mac, and Robert. It was from a lady at the supermarket, so I wasn't putting a lot of trust in it, but thought I'd check on it here.

[caz]

Robert,

I saw today an amusing little post that may tickle your fancy. ☺
Germany, Spain and France are prepared to give the following concessions if we still remain...

1) that it be officially recognised forever that the ball really did cross the line in 1966 and that it really was a goal.
2) that we can finally go around and freely say "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" after getting arrested on holiday on the Costa Brava without any bad consequences.
3) that 'allo 'allo will finally be recognised as farce and satire and will not be subtitled or dubbed or edited.
4) that we can call our beer 'beer' even though it isn't lager.
5) that steak and kidney pie will be considered a delicacy in line with snails.
6) that Basil Fawlty be allowed to brcome the next Prime Minister, which would allow him to mention what he tells people not to mention.
7) That Rutland be finally recognised as a Country in order for them to challenge Luxembourg, San Marino and Liechtenstein to a Test Series at Cricket.
8) That Cornish pasties don't have to be made in Cornwall to be called such.
9) That delivering milk in glass bottles on a doorstep is an excellent idea.
10) that bananas and cucumbers can now be any shape or size..and sold by the lb.
11) that eating fish and chips out of newspaper is not a health hazard.
12) that British humour be recognised as unequalled in European culture.
13) that all visitors to GB from EU countries take written and oral exams in Cockney, Glaswegian English, South Yorkshire English, Tyneside English and Welsh. Cornish would be a multiple choice exam.
and finally
14) that we are allowed to leave the Eurovision song Contest and never show it again on our televisions however much they beg us to participate and watch.

...😉😄😁

in these days of vitriol and mudslinging..a little light hearted fun to relax the mood.

Hi Phil,

Of course, that would still not be nearly enough to placate all the selfish old gits (sorry, selfless lovely people) who voted out so the next generation could experience the "good old days" of slave trading and sending small boys up chimneys.

There we are, some more light hearted fun for everyone.

Love,

Caz
X

[GUT]

Hi Phil,

Of course, that would still not be nearly enough to placate all the selfish old gits (sorry, selfless lovely people) who voted out so the next generation could experience the "good old days" of slave trading and sending small boys up chimneys.

There we are, some more light hearted fun for everyone.

Love,

Caz
X

Now now seems there was good money in the shave trade, for some.

[Robert]

Well, we abolished the slave trade in, what was it, 1806 or 1807, and slavery itself in 1833, I think. As for the chimneys, as a selfish old git there is no way that I'd send small boys up one. I might send one or two 18-24-year-old students up one, but since a chimney is an echo chamber, they'd be as happy as Larry.

I find the notion that anyone over 60 shouldn't be allowed to vote because they won't be affected by the result, a very strange one. Obviously that nice Remainer Mr Osborne thought they'd be affected - he warned them that their pensions were in danger. There is also the point that if you're going to ban over 60s from voting because the result won't affect them, you're going to have to ban younger people with terminal illnesses too. I think the Remainers should be the ones to inform these people that their illness disqualifies them. I'm sure they'd enjoy it.

[caz]

Joke's on you, pal. I don't have kids.

I take it back. For selfless lovely people read selfish old gits.

Who's going to look after you if and when you get too old to cope on your own? You will either have to pay an absolute fortune for your care or go cap in hand to the politicians who are left to clear up the mess. Good luck - you'll need it.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

This hopeless mess has been caused by Cameron promising a referendum he believed would not result in our exit from the EU and the egos of other 'make-it-up-as-they-go-along' politicians. As I wrote previously, Boris didn't even have an exit plan! Having created this mess together, they have abandoned ship - probably so that they cannot be blamed for any future disasters resulting from our exit.

The only solution is a General Election, or a Coalition Government so that out exit is as carefully negotiated as it can be.

Hear hear, Julie.

I find it ironic that the Brexit voters don't trust European politicians (who included the British ones) an inch, yet they have put their trust in an absolute shower who clearly had no clue how they would steer our country forward, and have no clue now.

Abandon ship, captain first, women and children last.

Love,

Caz
X

[Svensson]

You'll find that the EU is anti-democratic.

The absolute cornerstone of democracy is the ability to have a say in who taxes us what the money is spent on. If we don't like it, we remove them.

Classic case of muddling the waters in order to make a case. First of all, some people have tried to argue that the EU is un-democratic but I haven't heard yet that the Eu is supposedly anti-democtratic (as in actually opposing democracy) so I'll only go into the un-democratic argument.

There is nothing about taxes in democratic principles. Not in the EU (correct) but also not in the UK parliamentary system or any other that I'm aware of. There is a possibility however that the Swiss have a Volksentscheid when the issue of taxes is being debated.

It is usually the finance ministry who decides what taxes are being spent on. I have never has the opportunity to vote on HS2, Trident or the monumental takeover of several bank in 2009. This was all here in the UK, so do you suggest that, by extension, that the UK is also anti-democratic?

And yes, you can vote for a different composition of the European parliament. Likewise, when the UK government changes (the one you are voting for), so does their representation in the European council which is the member states' government's representation in Brussels.

We can't remove the unelected bureaucrats in Europe because none of us have voted for them.

There is the little matter of the European Parliament elections. This is where Messrs. Farage and Geofrey Bloom have their jobs because they were ELECTED into them. And btw, their attendence record was abysmal but they were happy to to trash an institution that is paying their bills. Hypocritical at best, unrepeatable at worst IMO (https://www.theguardian.com/world/da...ty-parliament).

So the MEPs are ELECTED. what is more, that parliament is a proportional representational parliament which is one heck of a lot more democratic than the UK first-past-the-post system. If a party gets 30% of the votes, they get 30% of the seats. There is no way to work out how many seats a party with 30% of the popular vote has. For example, in 2005 Tony Blair won a "landslide victory" with a massive parliamentary majority with only about 40% of the popular vote.

How democratic is that exactly?

Next, let's look at the UK upper house. No one has ever been elected to that particular arm of our legislative. Members are appointed on a crony-system or even worse, members are BORN into this chamber. Even after the Lord's reform under the Blair government, we still have 99 hereditary peers and we all know what happens to your IQ when cousins marry, right?

Finally, We can not vote for Civil Servants of the UK government. They are unelectable and therefore not accountable to the general public but only to the ministers. I guess this would be the equivalent for the "Brussels Eurocrats". In the end, we have just voted to exchange Brussels Bureaucrats with Westminster Bureaucrats. Doesn't sound like a massive step-up for me.

No one knows who they are and what they do,

That's because the UK media hardly report on it. This is different once you chek the main evening news in places like Germany, Austria or Holland. In the absence of the BBC or ITV (as if) reporting, there is always

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room

http://blogactiv.eu/

They might not be that exciting but I guess that's the nature of parliamentary work.

Alternatively, there is Sky Channel 508 which is full of the latest news on Brussels and Strassbourg.

and they pay themselves a small fortune,

an MEP's remuneration is roughly on par with their UK counterparts. It's not a small fortune, it is the going rate for parliamentarians in Western Europe, UK included.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-11725041

I would actually suggest that parliamentarians are grossly underpaid. I want our leaders to the best that there are available and not lose the brightest ones to the private sector where most of them can earn many times of what they earn in parliament. This would also leave them less exposed to bribes and other shenanigans like cash-for-questions or the expenses scandal (more on that below).

to the point where they even have an allowance for turning up. I mean, paying themselves extra on top of a huge salary just for being bothered to turn up and do their unelected jobs. Are these people ****in' serious?!

It is an absolute scam. A gravy train.

It is a scam train for those who don't turn up and do what they were elected to do like Farage and Bloom. They have some of the worst attendance records in Brussels (see above).

As for the gravy train, I remember that the UK parliamentarians have thought it necessary to help themselves to whatever they like from UK taxpayers. Duck houses, mortgages that they forgot they had paid off years ago, renting property from their spouses and getting that money claimed back from people like you and me,etc. That's the definition of a gravy train: Help yourself. The UK was slap-bang in the middle of some of the worst such scandal in recent times. Not the EU.

There is nothing 'fascist' about the Leave vote. Those brainwashed of course would say that.

Probably not fascist, I agree (Farage's poster aside, http://www.newstatesman.com/2016/06/...zi-propaganda), but the leave campaign is closer to the right than the remain campaign is.

Europeans want them because that is their history. They have always believed that a few 'experts' should dictate to millions. We on the other hand, have a different history. Magna Carta, Bill of Rights etc, and what this vote was about at least in part was a complete divergence in the history and culture of the English versus the Europeans.

I never saw it that way and I could list examples that would refute this:

- Napoleon's aim was to overthrow the monarchies and replacing them with meritocracies. Something that the UK still resits until this day to a certain extent (see house of Lord's).
- The Holy Roman empire was a lose collection of 1,000+ self-governing states with their own political systems, armies, currencies and laws with one symbolic, and therefore largely powerless emperor. Exactly the opposite of what you are suggesting. This lasted for several hundred years in Europe until the Napoleonic wars.
- The Reformation that was PRECISELY an uprising against the established order of the church and governance started in Germany in the 1560 and resulted in complete restructuring of the way of life in continental Europe.
- Revolutions in France 1789, Russia in 1917, Germany in 1918 to rid themselves of the ruling elites.

But in the end, History is littered with examples suggesting one way or another. On either side.

They're simply taking money from the general population and paying themselves handsomely and handing the rest out to people who are happy to be part of the system in return for being treated favourablly. As ever with things, it is to the detriment of the average man/woman on the street.

I don't see how this is any different to what the UK, German, US, or any other government does. A case of the glass being half empty..?

[caz]

I believe that nations should be independent. If the Scots think they're a nation, then they should be independent. The only thing that baffles me is, why on earth would the Scots want their independence and yet want to be part of the EU. There seems to be something about the word 'independence' that they can't quite grasp.

Why 'nations' Robert? Why not small islands or groups of islands, counties, cities or towns? If size matters it must be related to how well equipped a community is for the 'luxury' of independence. The way our politicians are behaving right now, I wouldn't trust a single one of them to run the proverbial piss-up in a very small brewery.

Love,

Caz
X

[Robert]

Hi Caz

Yes, why not? If, for instance, the Scots were to vote for independence - or their own eccentric idea of independence - which they'd be perfectly entitled to do, but the Shetlands decided to go it alone, then it would not be for me, sitting down here in Essex, to send them a note telling them that I'd looked at the figures and decided that they won't be able to make it on their own, so bad luck. Nor would it be for me to tell them that they are just being selfish - perhaps the word should be 'unmutual.'

I would draw the line at cities slap bang in the middle of a country's land mass declaring UDI. Sam Marino seems to function as a country within a country, but in general I wouldn't recommend it.

[caz]

I find the notion that anyone over 60 shouldn't be allowed to vote because they won't be affected by the result, a very strange one.

Has anyone suggested that, Robert?

My mother-in-law, 83, did her bit and voted. I was proud that she bothered, and would always defend her right (and duty?) to do so, whichever way she went. As it happens she is a Daily Mail reader who generally agrees with its politics (shudder), but on this occasion she was totally disgusted by all the 'colourful' headlines, trotted out day after day, about foreigners flooding in and taking our jobs (while simultaneously claiming unemployment benefit, naturally ) and raping our women if we didn't vote to leave the EU, while accusing the remain campaign of doing all the scaremongering. The result was that it so completely hacked her off that she voted to remain - "for the sake of my grandson's future", she said.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Interesting about this huge petition demanding a re-run. Why wasn't the petition launched before the referendum? After all, its signers knew the terms of the referendum. So why did they not protest before the voting?
Could it be that they smugly assumed they'd win?

Anyway, they've made it clear that if they don't get their own way, they'll scweam and scweam and scweam.

I hardly ever sign petitions, and of course won't be signing this one, but if the linked item is correct then I was wrong to say that the petition was ad hoc. According to this, it's an old petition placed by someone some time ago, which aroused little interest, but has now been used by disgruntled remainers. There are also suggestions that people from abroad have been signing it.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/683...ail-the-Brexit

Not just by 'someone', Robert, but by one in the Brexit camp, according to a similar article in the Daily Mail, which I happened to read over the ma-in-law's shoulder – cough cough.

Being in the Mail I'd have been sceptical if it wasn't going against the grain by admitting that this petition was in fact prepared before the vote, in fear and anticipation of a 'remain' win, in which event the Brexit camp was all set to cry "fix" and demand another go. So if the vote had gone the other way it seems pretty clear that the 'leavers' would have scweamed and scweamed just as loudly, only with a conspiracy theory thrown in for good measure.

I don't think it does us any good to slag off one side for the same kind of dirty tricks the other side has been using. We've just got to live with this now and try to make the best of it. At least you've got what you voted for and presumably what you feel is best for our nation, so you should be pleased that we will all soon be reaping the benefits of your decision.

Love,

Caz
X

[Robert]

Has anyone suggested that, Robert?

Not here Caz, no, but I have seen examples on political sites.

Of course, it isn't far from banning to suggest that old people should be entitled to vote, but that if they vote the 'wrong' way then they have swallowed lies, they don't understand the issues, they're not even intelligent or educated enough to understand the issues, they're racist xenophobic selfish bigots.

Now, what do we do? Do we allow one side to define what counts as an argument and what is a lie, to decide who is an expert and who isn't, and to rule on which motives are pure and which impure? Or do we have a vote and go with the majority? I'm a democrat.

Your mother-in-law made a judgement on behalf of her grandchildren, which she has every right to do. I'm going to let you into a secret here, Caz : some of the Leavers did the same thing, and came to a different conclusion.

[Robert]

Hi Caz

I am indeed pleased at the result. My only concern is that the result be respected.

Would I have screamed 'foul' if the result had gone the other way? I think my main reaction would have been to note that the British nation had ceased to exist.

[Svensson]

I think 90% of the population would expect the result to be respected. We would never get 100% of all to agree on that anyways.