Britons have voted for a myth of Camelot
Some reactions:
Woke up with a gasp…that still hasn’t ended. Am in mourning for a UK that once was and will never again be. The rhetoric of racism has won. Lessons of the past ignored. And the future security of our human rights laws, our ability to tackle our government on injustices, and the EU funds which have helped thousands of charities survive to do our government’s dirty work, is in jeopardy. Oh Britain…what have you done?
It’s a sad day for Britain, and for the world. Britons have voted for a myth of Camelot that never existed. We’ve shat on the future of the young generation, who supported Remain by 3 votes to 4. We’ve voted to have a recession. We’ve voted to be less significant in the world. And we’ve probably broken up the United Kingdom. Great way to ‘take back control’ guys.
Britons decide to leave the European Union,
So, finally the British people have expressed their choice. The European Union has been a great experiment in peace building and economic prosperty but now nationalism has struck back. I am afraid we are all going to see such a backlash in the rest of the EU.
Britain created a world empire and rule over several continents but now when power is to be shared with others in the European Union they want to separate.
Reminds me of the Muslim League’s stand that in a democracy the Muslims would be in a minority so we want a separate state – FOR THE 7 CENTURIES THE SAME ASHRAF ELITE only wanted to expand as much as they could in India but when it came to democracy they wanted separatism. The British attitude is the same.
So let’s take stock:
1. Nigel Farage starts the morning by retracting the £350 million claim
2. Daniel Hannan retracts the claim that leaving EU will reduce immigration
3. £100 billion wiped off the pensions, ISAs etc. invested in the FTSE
4. The pound suffers the largest currency depreciation of any currency ever
5. The Prime Minister resigns without mapping out a plan for implementing the results of the referendumIf I were a Leave voter, I would not be celebrating this morning. Sure, things might stabilise in time, but the immediate aftermath of the vote is admission that they’d been lied to & financial meltdown on a scale even pessimists did not predict. We Remainers may be in despair, but the Leavers ought to be fucking livid.
EDIT:
6. The biggest share price losses were Wimpy Taylor & Barclay Homes, at ~40%, which means the markets are expecting a housing crash
7. Apparently the pound’s value dropping so much means that the UK is no longer the 5th largest economy in the world – in a nicely symbolic move, we’ve been overtaken by France
Not being British, I can see some positives in this:
* A Tory PM has resigned in humiliation.
* The reunification of Ireland is back on the agenda.
* Scotland, which overwhelmingly voted to Remain, will push again for independence.
* Our neoliberal elites have once again been exposed as incompetent.
The EU, in its 2016 form, increasingly looks like the political arm of the German banking system (see: Greece). If the EU were to disintegrate over the next 10-15 years then this might be a blessing in disguise.
justinr-
I like neither tories nor neoliberals, but why do you think your other points are positive at all?
#1
A shame it came with such spectacular harm to Merrie England. I’m not sure your positives are worth the price, and I’m not sure I’m on board with the idea that one must try to look for good in bad news. I think this is just plain bad news.
cazz #2:
“Britain” itself is a myth; the Union is a takeover of the old Celtic countries by an Anglo-Saxon one.
Once the heat goes out of this I think it will dawn on people that this is part of a normal process. There will be a price to pay in the short-to-medium term but there’s a price for everything.
I honestly was shocked by the result last night. And it seems that my fellow Brits are in some sort of competition to seem as stupid as humanly possible on the world stage. There are tales of how many ‘Leave’ voters were voting as a protest, they didn’t actually want to leave? Some ‘Leave’ voters are saying they’ve changed their minds. And that’s not counting the Google traffic for ‘what is the EU’ which apparently spiked this morning.
Damn it, this was not hard. Referenda are not elections – you don’t get a protest vote, you just get a vote. You vote for what you actually want to happen. That’s it. Voting ‘Leave’ because you didn’t really think the Leave campaign would win is the depths of deliberate ignorance and stupidity.
David Cameron has tossed the country off a cliff to stave off a political revolt within his own party. Party over country. Take heed, America. They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. It is not. It is paved with cowardice, hubris and ignorance.
Justine, would you really want to be a woman in Northern Ireland faced with what passes for abortion rights in Eire?
Let’s get some perspective, it’s a day after the vote and the apocalypse hasn’t occurred. The citizens of a member of an inward looking protectionist trade bloc on the Eurasian peninsula have voted to leave. Another attempt to recreate the Roman Empire has perhaps faltered, whether permanently or not only time will tell. After the financial chickens calm down, the trans national corporations which really run globalisation will return to business as usual.
The UK will probably never untangle itself from the EU, no need to panic.
The referendum will confirm the Eurocrats deep suspicion of direct democracy, they definitely won’t allow any more of this nonsense from their plebs on the mainland, unless Eurosceptic parties are in power.
Nobody said anything about an apocalypse, and of course one hasn’t happened overnight – on the other hand the currency has dropped sharply among other effects.
Something can be short of an apocalypse and still have a lot of unpleasant results. We’re allowed to discuss that.
I continue to be shocked by two things: that a referendum like this could pass by a simple majority, and that there is actually serious talk of following through on it. I would think that structural changes this profound should at LEAST require a large turnout and a large majority.
MrFancyPants #9:
Here in Australia, for a referendum to pass it doesn’t just require a majority, but a majority of votes in a majority of States. There is the alternative option of a plebiscite, which requires a simple majority. We’ll be having a plebiscite on gay marriage if the Coalition wins next week’s election.
justinr
“there is the alternative option of a plebiscite,”
No, it’s not really an alternative since plebiscites are described as ‘advisory’. Even if there were an overwhelming vote for same sex marriage, either the House or the Senate could (theoretically) vote against it.
Claire #5:
I agree, but I think that for many people voting leave, it wasn’t so much about a protest vote as a frustrated reaction to feeling ignored and disenfranchised by the government. A stupid reaction to be sure, because there’s no obvious way that leaving the EU will alleviate the problems – real or imagined – that concern them. But it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that London voted to stay but the North East, where I live, overwhelmingly voted to leave. The North East has persistently been either screwed, ignored or both by government. There are a lot of pit villages in my region which have never recovered from the dismantling of the coal industry and towns like Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Sunderland took a long time to recover, with very little help from similar dismantling of the dockyards, chemical and steel industries. They are still very vulnerable, as the recent closing of yet another steel mill showed. The recent
Don’t misunderstand, I think the leave decision is a disaster. But I can understand why people with a lifetime of struggle and feeling out of control might vote leave as a desperate last resort, as foolish a response as that is.
Having said all that, there still seem to be an awful lot of people who voted solely in the interest of “getting our country back”, whatever that means. And of course, many more who were either casually, knee-jerk or outright racists.
@RJW:
Technically, that’s also true with the EU referendum. In theory, parliament could have decided to ignore the decision.
latsot,
Yes, that’s why the EU ‘referendum’ is really a plebiscite. Many commenters seem to think that the decision to leave the EU is irrevocable, it isn’t.
Britain joined the EU or whatever it was called at the time, without a popular vote, amazing. One of the advantages of unwritten constitutions, I suppose.
@RJW:
Not really. The idea began as a series of treaties between several European nations. Plainly, individual treaties are not usually the sorts of thing you’d expect to require a public vote. But things developed into what became known as the Common Market or EEC and there was a referendum in 1975 on whether we should stay or leave. That time, the remain campaign was very successful; if I remember rightly the vote was 67% in favour.
Since then, the Common Market changed rather a lot and the EU isn’t necessarily the thing that people voted for in 1975. I think that’s understandable. Could people really be expected to understand the implications, decades down the line, of something that had never happened before? By contrast, it’s quite a lot easier to understand many of the implications of leaving the EU.
I’ve no idea what a written constitution has to do about any of this, though.
In principle, you’re right. Practice, of course, is a different matter altogether. There’s no way at all that the UK government could have gotten away with ignoring the vote, even though it could have done in principle.
latsot,
(1) “There’s no way at all that the UK government could have gotten away with ignoring the vote,”
Yes, but the process will be long and tedious, so I wouldn’t bet against another ‘referendum’ in the medium term. I’d also bet on the UK staying as a de facto member of the EU, like Norway or Switzerland.
(2) “I’ve no idea what a written constitution has to do about any of this, though.”
This is one definition—
“A written constitution is a formal document defining the nature of the constitutional settlement, the rules that govern the political system and the rights of citizens and governments in a codified form.”
So, as far I understand in the UK Parliament is supreme, and it can change the political structure without consulting the people, that’s the point.
(3) “Could people really be expected to understand the implications, decades down the line, of something that had never happened before”
No, but they could understand the consequences of increased integration into the EU and it’s been 40 years.
Nope. We have these things called laws. A written constitution isn’t the only way for a country to protect itself from governments running amok.
@17 latsot,
The government in power can change ‘these things called laws’, I thought that point was obvious.
No, there are limits on what laws can be changed. i thought that was obvious.
@19
“Limits” ? Who or what sets the limits? I know, I know…..Parliament? Or perhaps Her Majesty? You’re arguing in circles.
Perhaps the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ needs to take some lessons from her various daughter parliaments around the world.
> “No, there are limits on what laws can be changed. i thought that was obvious.”
The only theoretical limit in the UK is that no parliament can bind future parliaments. Our government can make or repeal any law, without limitation.
The attempt to constrain that capability through an unelected supranational body is exactly what we just voted against.
Saying that parliament is one of the things that limits the changing of laws is not circular reasoning. There are some very worrying things happening in the UK government. I’m very worried about the increasing level of surveillance, for example. And of course laws like that are a sort of ratchet; it’s hard to turn them back if we change our minds in the future.
But the idea that a government could suddenly change the entire structure of how government works is not realistic, even if could happen in theory. For one thing, governments aren’t around long enough to comprehensively change all the laws required in the right order to make such changes. For another, changes in law don’t happen in isolation of parliament or of the population.
In practice, such enormous changes to the structure of government couldn’t happen within the term of a government.
That doesn’t mean that drastic changes in laws couldn’t creep up on us over time, but that can happen with or without a written constitution.