weltweit
Well-Known Member
no no, that would be mad, nuke Portugal - they are defenceless!
Brexit or Bremain - Urban votes
- Thread starter DrRingDing
- Start date
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
A contribution towards the argument to vote 'remain' from a member of Plan C...
Damned if You Leave, Damned if You Remain: The Europe Referendum Or What to Do in the Absence of a ‘Left Option’?
Damned if You Leave, Damned if You Remain: The Europe Referendum Or What to Do in the Absence of a ‘Left Option’?
Corax
Luke 5:16
Yeah, but they've practically legalised weed, so they get a stay of execution. Andorra maybe?
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
kebabking
Not a Girly Swot, but I like them....
Portugal is, I believe, one if the few countries in Europe - or anywhere else - we've not had a war with in the last 600 years or so...
Say 'war with Portugal', just say it outloud, if under your breath if in polite company, and what do you feel? Nothing, just a 'meh..'.
Now, say 'war with France'. Different isn't it? You want to say it again don't you - but louder, harder, you want to open an upstairs window and shout it across the street and then run to your local church and set the bells ringing! 'War with France', just saying it fills your chest, tightens the sinews, makes you feel like a Lion - 'War with France', its why language was invented, why we crawled from the seas, it is man's natural condition.
War with Portugal my fucking hoop.
dylanredefined
Not a house elf a tiger
Also that's where the port is. Though considering how drunk i got last weekend no more port would be a good thing for me
Corax
Luke 5:16
On the other hand, it's clearly their turn.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
And mine.
This is what tilts me conclusively away from voting leave, even if it's only towards cock-and-balls:
I am very concerned about the kind of people who would seize power to shape a post-EU UK. Doesn't mean I'm not also concerned about the people who would remain in power in a stay-in-the-EU UK. But I think the article is dead right that this referendum isn't the battleground. Neither result promises anything other than different versions of more of the same, so any vote is essentially a negative one, and delivering a defeat to nationalists is a negative reason to vote stay. Bit like voting Khan in the London mayoral election in order to contribute towards the downfall of the racist Zac Goldsmith. Not about how great Khan is, simply a means of producing a defeat for a racist. That crumb was all that was on offer - the important issues to do with housing in London, for instance, remain untouched either way.
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
i'm voting out specifically to null your vote
weltweit
Well-Known Member
I will be voting early, and voting often
Deadline for getting your postal votes organised is 8th June I'm pretty sure. So for those who'll be away on the 23rd, eg at Glastonbury, we need to get our shit together.
I really like that Plan C article that LynnDoyleCooper posted.
I really like that Plan C article that LynnDoyleCooper posted.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
It's written by someone called Bertie though. Not sure I can get past that tbh.
I don't care about Bertie, but I confess to knowing nothing about who the Plan C organisation are .....
DotCommunist
So many particulars. So many questions.
hilariously in the late 90s the salty meaning hadn't caught on in australia land so you'd occaisonally see the word used in its original context on Nieghbours and laugh so hard by the time you got your breath back Fresh Prince of Bel Air was on
SaskiaJayne
Rural Guerrilla
That is an excellent read, it has certainly given me more clarity of thought. It properly articulates what I have been trying to work out in my own head & struggling with. Not all us urban posters can be clear thinking intellectuals & it has certainly helped me collect my thoughts.
I liked that article a lot as well. But.
However sound the 'corporate interests always win whatever the result' arguments are, and they are compelling, I simply can't bring myself to even think about voting Brexit. For largely the same reasons as in that article.
However sound the 'corporate interests always win whatever the result' arguments are, and they are compelling, I simply can't bring myself to even think about voting Brexit. For largely the same reasons as in that article.
Puddy_Tat
naturally fluffy
That is an excellent read, it has certainly given me more clarity of thought. It properly articulates what I have been trying to work out in my own head & struggling with. Not all us urban posters can be clear thinking intellectuals & it has certainly helped me collect my thoughts.
yes - the position
is vaguely what i'm tending towards
although i can see merit in some of the 'leave' arguments
and the idea of drawing something rude on the ballot paper
bremeh
Yes, I have come to similar conclusions to that article. There is no left option but encouraging the Brexit types is the worse option. Just look at the characters who inhabit that tendency and weep. I will not align myself with Johnson, Gove, Farage et al even though Cameron and Osborne are not people you would want to be associated with.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
Anyone who talks about "Another Europe", a "Social Europe", transforming the EU or reforming the EU should immediately be written off as a fool who doesn't understand what the EU is or a knave who does understand it but is deliberately lying. There are rational arguments to be made for voting Remain, whether you agree with them or not, but those rational arguments are necessarily grounded entirely in pessimism. Anyone claiming that the EU can be turned into something other than the EU if only Britain stays involved is a gobshite.
Thanks William, I have been wrestling with these problems for a while.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
The EU's been changed significantly in the past, why is it now unable to change in the future?
Austerity is proving to be such a disastrous policy across Europe that I really can't see that it's not going to get ditched at some point in the next few years, with the emphasis returning to growth and job creation instead.
And then you woke up. It had all been a dream.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
you think?
The neoliberal austerity consensus is showing signs of crumbling electorally across much of Europe already, now the IMF is writing reports basically saying they got it wrong. I can see the writing on the wall for it, and it'd be much more likely to go if the UK stayed in and a Corbyn labour took power here than without us. It won't die easily, but I can't see that permanent stagnation and huge unemployment levels are going to be tolerated for much longer.
Not that the EU austerity policies directly impact on us directly anyway, the UK government has been doing it voluntarily.
Nigel Irritable
Five, Ten, Fifteen Years
The EU is an agreement between the ruling classes of Europe to march in lockstep towards a neoliberal dystopia, and to brutalise any country that straggles along the way. It has developed as it has because moving towards that dystopia in a more or less orderly manner has been a shared goal of all of Western Europe's governments. That is each change, or more precisely each development, has been the joint policy of each state.
Reversing that course is not a matter of winning an election, as say a left reformist national government might be voted in to replace a bog standard neo-liberal one. To change the EU's institutions and rules in significant ways requires not simply electing a majority to the European Parliament with these new imaginary goals, but also electing like-minded governments in each and every country simultaneously, so as to avoid the veto powers of the Council of Europe. And not only that, it requires maintaining those governments long enough to replace the Commission. And then maintaining all of that long enough to rewrite EU legislation, dismantle or drastically alter it's major institutions , write new Treaties undoing significant portions of the old ones and ratify them in every member state. Anyone who thinks that this is an achievable goal is a fantasist of the silliest kind.
One of the more startling things about watching the debate in Britain is just how completely fucking ignorant of the structures of the EU most of the participants in the debate are - on this side of the Irish Sea we have referendums on each Treaty (so one every four or five years), so those who are put forward to make an argument for any side do at least generally know what they are talking about. If only because they don't have a choice in the matter. In Britain there is no such background understanding so the debate generally involves next to no detail about the actual EU and its actual institutions. Instead you get people mouthing off about the European Court of Human Rights (not an EU institution) on the Leave side or making dopey analogies with changing the direction of a national government on the Remain side.
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free spirit
more tea vicar?
where do the elements of the EU that have continued to introduce and strengthen protections on workers rights, social and environmental protections fit into this neoliberal dystopia?
Actually much of the EU's core documents aren't particularly neoliberal in outlook, the core bit that is being the stability and growth pact bit of the Maastrict treaty which is badly misnamed as it contains no requirements about growth.
As the UK has no penalties that can be applied to it for failing to adhere to it's clauses, then it's not even directly relevant to the UK, but the UK if it stayed and turned against austerity could play a significant role in helping to expose the economic illiteracy behind it.
Most of the rest of the EU's key documents are more compatable with the kind of post war keynesian version of capitalism than the current neolieral / austerity based model. If Greece hadn't capitulated I suspect Varoufakis intended to challenge the enforced austerity policies as being incompatible with these.
Here are a few examples of some of the core texts that to my mind really aren't neoliberal, at least not in the sense pushed by the US based neoliberal institutions such as the IMF, WTO. And to my mind they're incompatible with the austerity policies that have been pushed on Greece, Spain, Ireland, Portugal.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2008:115:0013:0045:en:PDF
To me, this doesn't look like the workings of an organisations that's committed to marching in lockstep to a neoliberal vision of the future, nor one that would require every treaty to be rewritten to dump the current austerity fad. It's basically only the Maastricht treaty that creates the basis for austerity policies being enforced, so it's really just one element of one treaty that needs to be rewritten in order to kill the austerity version of the EU off for good.
