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Is Brexit actually going to happen?

Will we have a brexit?

  • Yes - A fully independant Britain making its own way in the world (apart from scotland).

    Votes: 66 18.2%

  • A Semi-Detached Norway type deal

    Votes: 111 30.7%

  • No - 2nd referendum and/or face saving fudge to let us slink back in feeling a bit fucking stupid

    Votes: 185 51.1%
  • Total voters
    362
planetgeli said:
They are in it for the capitalism, because they believe in capitalism. And part of that belief is that stratification and inequality is desirable. So yes, I do believe that to a large extent they do revel in redundancies and poverty and I can’t believe any twat who has made people redundant goes home particularly crying about it at night.

It’s in their belief system to fuck us over.
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The Labour Party believes in capitalism, the LDs believe in capitalism, PC and the SNP do, the Greens do. There's not a major political party in this country that doesn't believe "that stratification and inequality [are] desirable", or at least acceptable. It's the belief system all these groups to fuck workers over.

The bosses at my work that have made people redundant aren't Tories, they're Labour supporters and members. Some of them even back Corbyn but they are still attacking workers. And I'm sure they absolutely regret making people redundant, not enough to not make people redundant, not enough to give up their £100K+ jobs (which is why they are the enemy) but it's something they don't want. The fact the the councillors in Birmingham that are attacking the striking workers there are Labour might mean that they view the actions as less desirable than if they were Tory councillors but if makes fuck all difference to the workers.
 
Sorry redsquirrel I don’t understand what you are trying to inform me of that I don’t already know. Other than your belief that you think they regret these actions slightly more if they are Labour capitalists than if they are Tory capitalists. With which I disagree. Regret is just a useful word for some of them to appear kinder poverty causing twats. Which personally I don’t fall for.
 
chilango said:
Yeah.

For all we might be enjoying the Tories tearing themselves apart (and I know I am:)) it's not like the Left has emerged stronger from all this to take advantage is it?
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I think it would be unrealistic to expect that 'the left' (however we define that, and clearly different people will define it differently) would/will simply and suddenly emerge stronger from any Tory meltdown, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

It may create possibilities, but those possibilities will have to be taken up and built upon, which will mean hard work over the years to come. We won't really be in a position to judge whether the left has benefited from the whole Brexit business for another five or ten years, it's certainly not going to be measured by whether or not Corbyn's Labour win the next GE.
 
planetgeli said:
Sorry redsquirrel I don’t understand what you are trying to inform me of that I don’t already know.
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I'm trying to move beyond Ming's cartoon view of the Tory party, a view is that is both silly and ends up propping Labour/LDs/Greens/PC/SNP attacks on workers.

A worker who is a Tory party member/voter is still a worker, a boss who is a Labour/LD/Green/PC/SNP member/voter is still a boss.

EDIT: Local councillors, of whatever party, that are attacking workers are the enemy, but very, very few of them are in it for the money.
 
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Supine said:
A GE would be crazy. Both parties would probably stand on a leave manifesto so remainers wouldn't get closure whoever won.
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This is an interesting post. If we do a bit of a dolly zoom away from Brexit and shift focus to the background, which for many at the moment will cause a dizzying perspective disparity, that is exactly the feeling I’ve had about general elections for decades now. That no matter how much I care about the issues, there is no real choice between the parties. The neoliberal project has seen to that. Thatcher was right - for the electorate, there has long been no alternative. And even were Corbyn to win, it is likely that even his mild programme (a programme Heath might have thought daringly Hayakian) of centre left tinkering, hysterically vilified as outrageously Marxist, would be limited and stymied where necessary by the financial institutions and others, as “unworkable”.

The background to the Brexit exit debacle is the ongoing strife in the ruling classes between two competing ideologies: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. We await the outcome of the accommodation they will come to. But it is that strife and not Brexit itself which is the wider lens picture.

The point of a GE would be to shake up the numbers in the House. That it would not deliver a Remain government does not make it ‘crazy’ from the point of view of those willing it. Because that is not what the strife is now. Remain versus Leave is over. Imagine Remain won by the same margin, and three years later Leave was able to put tens of thousands on the streets and gather close to 5 millions signatures on a position. Would you argue that the democratic result should be overturned? I highly doubt it. But that is the close up from Act 1. We’re approaching Act 3 now, and we’re seeing the whole battlefield, and the battle being fought is about the various visions of how capitalism in the UK will be done in future.
 
danny la rouge said:
Imagine Remain won by the same margin, and three years later Leave was able to put tens of thousands on the streets and gather close to 5 millions signatures on a position.
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Not overturned but I would argue that government should acknowledge the apparent change in public opinion and maybe have a second referendum as the margin was so small. I would argue this no matter what side I was on originaly.

We should also remember the 3,600,000 signatories to the original petition in 2016 all of which were ignored.

Personally I vote to elect an MP to run the country for the benefit of the country not to go running to the people when things get a little tough. After this debacle I am left wondering who can I vote for? not for anyone serving as an MP at the moment is my first thought.
 
collectordave said:
Personally I vote to elect an MP to run the country for the benefit of the country not to go running to the people when things get a little tough.
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Whereas I utterly reject this Burkean version of “democracy”, the trustee model of “representation”. It isn’t democracy and it isn’t representation. It’s paternalist oligarchy. And I’m agin it.
 
danny la rouge said:
This is an interesting post. If we do a bit of a dolly zoom away from Brexit and shift focus to the background, which for many at the moment will cause a dizzying perspective disparity, that is exactly the feeling I’ve had about general elections for decades now. That no matter how much I care about the issues, there is no real choice between the parties. The neoliberal project has seen to that. Thatcher was right - for the electorate, there has long been no alternative. And even were Corbyn to win, it is likely that even his mild programme (a programme Heath might have thought daringly Hayakian) of centre left tinkering, hysterically vilified as outrageously Marxist, would be limited and stymied where necessary by the financial institutions and others, as “unworkable”.

The background to the Brexit exit debacle is the ongoing strife in the ruling classes between two competing ideologies: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. We await the outcome of the accommodation they will come to. But it is that strife and not Brexit itself which is the wider lens picture.

The point of a GE would be to shake up the numbers in the House. That it would not deliver a Remain government does not make it ‘crazy’ from the point of view of those willing it. Because that is not what the strife is now. Remain versus Leave is over. Imagine Remain won by the same margin, and three years later Leave was able to put tens of thousands on the streets and gather close to 5 millions signatures on a position. Would you argue that the democratic result should be overturned? I highly doubt it. But that is the close up from Act 1. We’re approaching Act 3 now, and we’re seeing the whole battlefield, and the battle being fought is about the various visions of how capitalism in the UK will be done in future.
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What I would be arguing, and I said something very similar right after the referendum, would be that there is very obviously a big split in the country and that there is a need to address the concerns of those wanting to leave the EU by being very careful about any future relationship or closer union. If the big demos and big petitions were being made in response to some proposal for closer union (analogous to the current situation with the May deal of ending freedom of movement, leaving customs union, etc), I'd say that they, along with the 48% who voted leave three years ago (let's assume that the numbers are reversed) were an indication that there isn't a mandate to do such a thing.

The equivalent of the above reasoning very obviously hasn't happened in the brexit process thus far, hence May's deal, hence the protests and petitions.

But this also goes back to the weakness of the referendum and the weakness of any mandate for leave that it has produced - there was no plan and there was no democratically mandated group to enact a plan. Not one of May's 'red lines' was on the ballot question. Overturning May's deal isn't overturning the referendum result. And if the result of overturning May's deal is, say, a big long extension of a year or more, then the validity of an already weak and vague mandate from more than four years ago is very seriously called into question. I don't see how it can survive without a second vote, tbh. I've rather changed my opinion on that. Process there is: there is a vote, and the political classes make a total hash of implementing the result; therefore, the process is restarted and there is another vote to validate that new process. This is a failure of political process, but it isn't necessarily an anti-democratic failure - calling the second ref is simply a new act in the democratic process to validate the start of a new political process. If leave wins again, the process to leave goes off again, hopefully with lessons learned as to why the first process failed.

And my final thought on this is to consider the politicians who are most often publicly invoking the 17.4 million and why they are doing so. They are doing so because they want a 'hard' brexit along the lines of May's deal or even harder than that. And they are a using wholly dishonest concern for democracy as a cover for pushing through that vision. Latest in a long line doing this that I just heard on R4 was a certain M. Howard.
 
A question for the Remainers, particularly anyone who attended the march yesterday.

Getting a million out onto the streets is impressive. What should be done with all those people now? What's the next step?
 
chilango said:
Yes.

But....

...what are the million on the street going to do next in order to get this to happen

That's my question.

Not "what do you want?" But "how are you going to get it?"
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They can probably rely on quite a few MP's 'listening' to be fair - certainly more than the Iraq war march could.
 
...but, to repeat my question to Remainers, a million is a pretty powerful number of people willing to march. What should they do next?
 
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collectordave said:
Personally I vote to elect an MP to run the country for the benefit of the country not to go running to the people when things get a little tough. After this debacle I am left wondering who can I vote for? not for anyone serving as an MP at the moment is my first thought.
Click to expand...

My MP has recently reneged on the party and policies which got him elected, and has thrown his lot in with a bunch of pro-austerity, pro-privatisation blairites and tories. Neither I nor anyone else in this constituency seem to have any way of getting him removed from his position despite the fact he is no longer even pretending to represent the interests of the local electorate.

Representational democracy is not a real thing, it's just a new coat of paint slapped onto a medieval system.
 
chilango said:
...but, to repeat my question to Remainers, a million is a pretty powerful number of people willing to march. What should they do next?
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They have nothing to offer leavers so all that is left is power moves, top down moves to stop it. They literally can offer nothing in the long term - the daft parts of leave can pulled apart from the things like defence of the welfare state. That's a real political project. Remain has - stay like this. Scary dangerous. Some people have no idea.
 
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