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BBC: UK Votes To Leave The European Union (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: The UK has voted by 52% to 48% to leave the European Union after 43 years in a historic referendum, a BBC forecast suggests. London and Scotland voted strongly to stay in the EU but the remain vote has been undermined by poor results in the north of England. Voters in Wales and the English shires have backed Brexit in large numbers. The referendum turnout was 71.8% -- with more than 30 million people voting -- the highest turnout since 1992. London has voted to stay in the EU by around 60% to 40%. However, no other region of England has voted in favor of remaining. Britain would be the first country to leave the EU since its formation -- but a leave vote will not immediately mean Britain ceases to be a member of the 28-nation bloc. That process could take a minimum of two years, with Leave campaigners suggesting during the referendum campaign that it should not be completed until 2020 -- the date of the next scheduled general election. The prime minister will have to decide when to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which would give the UK two years to negotiate its withdrawal. Once Article 50 has been triggered a country can not rejoin without the consent of all member states. British Prime Minister David Cameron is under pressure to resign as a result of the decision. UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage called on him to quit "immediately." One labor source said, "If we vote to leave, Cameron should seriously consider his position." Several pro-Leave Conservatives including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove have signed a letter to Mr. Cameron urging him to stay no matter the decision. Mr. Cameron did say he would trigger Article 50 as soon as possible after a leave vote.
Update 6/24 09:33 GMT: David Cameron has resigned.
Update 6/24 09:33 GMT: David Cameron has resigned.
The sheer showing the finger value to 'experts' is amazing in this one!
Scotland (which recently voted to stay in Great Britain because they were told they would drop out of the EU if they left the UK) and Northern Ireland voted to stay in. England and Wales voted to get out.
So Small Britain, or the United Kingdom of England and Wales, will leave the EU.
Probably, we will see Northern Ireland join the Irish Republic and Scotland to become independent during the next 2 years.
So the EU is supposed to serve several purposes: common market, free labor movement and mutual support for countries. But it turned out that free labor movement doesn't provide a lot of benefits to Britain and everybody remembers well how Germany raped Greece instead of helping it.
The question of free trade still remains, Britain will have to secure trade deals with lots of countries.
Here's the naked truth from an Spaniard:
1) UK got privileges no other country got:
- They kept their old monetary unit (GBP)
- They kept the *right to refuse entry* (not signed SENGEN)
- They kept the old measuring unit system (instead of International System)
- They kept colonies in other countries of the EU (Gibraltar) even though it's clearly illegal and have a specific article forbidding it.
Etc.
2) The Universal Declaration of Human Right, which all countries are obliged to comply with as is *written* in the European Treaties and Constitution, says clearly:
Art. 1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
3) As the UK did not comply with the "rights" part of the UDHR, forced by the EU Constitution and International Treaties, and shitted in the treaties that form the core and meaning of the EU (SENGEN, no colonies, etc.) I can say anything but...
GO F**K YOURSELVES
PS: It's a pity that Ireland got kicked too due to their stupidity.
So, it turns out that borders matter after all! And that First World citizens don't like being flooding with Third Worlders who don't necessarily want to assimilate, and in fact seem to want to make their new country more like the hellholes they escaped from. And that opinions that are criticized do better in the privacy of the voting booth than in polls. (See: "shy Tory effect" or "Bradley effect.")
Now we have Trump, who at least talks a good game about loving his country, vs. Hillary, who wants to "fix" and "improve" it by doing things like importing more Muslim refugees and restricting gun rights. Many people are going to be shocked when Trump wins.
(To those of you wanting to verbally abuse and downvote me: this is a prediction, not an endorsement.)
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RIP our stupid country and the idiots who live in it. Looking forward to people suddenly realising that the EU are going to actually negotiate our access to the single market rather than completely surrendering to us. Would be pretty ironic if we ended up getting forced into Schengen.
First order of business should be to sign all the free-trade deals that the EU was preventing. Canada, Australia, China, etc.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I mean, John Oliver eviscerated the Leavers on his show! How could this happen? How could racist old white men hijack the vote? It is 2016!
Yeah if only the UK had a manufacturing based economy instead of a consumer based one.
Some how I doubt that is going to happen. Because leaving the EU is primarily about racism, not bureaucracy.
Personally I expect to experience a great amount of schadenfreude watching the consequences of this circular firing squad. Now the UK's economic and political situation is in complete chaos, and that will inevitably lead to an economic downturn. Markets are allergenic to uncertainty. It's not going to work itself out quickly, so the economic mess will linger.
In terms of mass stupidity, I also suggest that they drop the metric units system and join the US in using imperial units. As long as they want to deny the relevancy of the rest of the world, it's another way to be out of step with (almost) everyone else.
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I voted "remain" in the end, but it was a close run thing. I'm philosophical about the results; we won't know the real implications for some time. But be under no illusions, this was not just about the EU. Indeed, the EU never really dominated the campaign. It was a rebellion against a long standing political consensus and, in particular, the legacy of Blairism. In essence, Blairism was the marriage of Thatcherite economics to social mores which had previously been the concern of the far left; basically free markets plus multiculturalism. The intention was that over time, the population would buy into that. In London and Scotland, it more or less happened. But in much of the U.K., the population went the other way. An unbalanced economy dependent on financial services squeezed their finances and living standards, while mass immigration forced down wages and created visible, angry, unassimilated immigrant communities in their midst. Moreover, the usual channels of democratic restoration were blocked. Blair's biggest achievement was to foster a media environment which labelled any questioning of the social consensus as racist and a legal system which in some cases made it an arrestable offence. Meanwhile, too many of our institutions changed their ethos from public service to "thought leadership"; trying to reform the population rather than meeting its needs. The vote, I think, needs to be seen as a rebellion against that. I wish the result had been different, but I accept that it wasn't. I live and work in London and my whole circle voted to remain. My parents live in the suburbs of a northern city and they and their circle voted to leave. I had been warning colleagues for weeks that I thought a Leave win was likely; I thought the polling was both running into "social acceptability bias" and underestimating the likelihood that the lower income groups would vote. This, incidentally, is why I would bet on Trump winning in November, scary though that is. And things feel scary in the UK this morning. But a proper discussion of why the vote went the way it did and an acceptance that we need to at least accept and tolerate our divisions rather than widening them would be good first steps.
The US has its problems, yes. But it's hardly dead, and that's a pretty dumb thing to say. The US is still the world's largest economy. The US exerts a tremendous amount of political influence. The US has a massive military with a hell of a lot of firepower. That hardly sounds dead to me. In so many ways, the US is actually a rock of stability compared to Europe. Since the Civil War, we haven't had any states seriously try to leave the US. Our Presidency has been handed over peacefully each time to the winner of the election. We haven't fought wars over here in North America for a long time. Despite our faults, the US has been extremely stable and will probably continue to be for a long time. The rest of the world knows it, too. That's why, for example, the dominant reserve currency throughout the world is the US Dollar. If we were truly that bad, the world wouldn't trust the US Dollar. I know that it's practically a sport around here to bash the US, but we've been quite a bit more stable than Europe.
As far as I see, not even the EU sceptic UK politicians really wanted this. They just wanted to beat Cameron and probably blackmail the EU. I believe this has backfired, and the UK will suffer. (EU too, but to a much less degree). I'm sure Farage and the rest of the crooks wanted that Brexit fails, but only barely. Now, lets see how UK will fare without the cheap EU workers, increased trade tax, visa to the EU and all the 'good things' non-EU countries have to cope with.
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From the perspective of a very far on looker (a Canadian living in China), the result of the referendum is very unfortunate. Since WWII, generations and generations of people, with long term vision for a stable and peaceful Europe, had put their weight to form the Union. It's certainly not perfect, but it's better, by a long measure, than the situation in the first half of the 20th century. I am quite amazed that more older generation stand by the Leave camp. I would have thought that they should be the ones who know better. With one referendum, which is more fueled by temporary discontent than calm reasoning, they want to dismantle what took years and years to gradually build up. The chain reactions in the coming years won't be pretty, and I hope I would be wrong.
I was born in Cambodia, been through the Khmer Rouge regime, lost 80% of our family, spent 8 years in a refugee camp in Vietnam, and was lucky enough to be accepted in Canada when I was 18. In the 1990s, I was very happy to see the Berlin wall fall, and that Europeans countries were merging into one block with their interests tightly interconnected, and I could only dream of a same scenario for Asia, a scenario that would take many many more years to even be a prospective, if at all.
The bottom of your society is literally an endless abyss, whereas the EU has a well-functioning security net, and where it's easy to have a high quality of life even with a simple job. But you, you live in a supposed first-world country with third-world living standards in many parts, where people have to take two jobs just to reach the point where they can start counting pennies to make ends meet... and you call the EU a failed state? You Americans are an endless source of unintentional comedy.
Proof, if it were needed, that people are too stupid to be trusted with decisions like this. The primary objection was that "the loser could win", demonstrating beyond any doubt that most people can't understand simple mathematics.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
There are a number of obvious contributing factors to Brexit. Nationalism and selfishness are two of the most obvious.
So let's consider the enlightened discussion here on slashdot, this bastion of intellectual turmoil and whatever.
There have been several hundred comments so far. No mention of "nationalism" yet appears. One marginally related but tangential mention of "selfish" and no mentions of "selfishness". Maybe there are some hidden references, but then their invisibility reflects the failure of the moderation system. However, I think Brexit reflects a larger failure of journalism in general and a more specific failure of slashdot in particular.
People who were capable of thinking about the future would not vote in favor of fracturing Europe. They would have been able to put the broader long-term interests of their own grandchildren ahead of their various minor terrors of foreigners stealing their jobs, especially considering that if 52% hated the EU I'd bet that a much higher percentage hate their own jobs and ought to be glad if some immigrants would steal them.
Same rise of ignorant short-sighted stupidity has made it possible for the Donald of Trump to become a serious contender for the presidency, squatting on his bizarre high chair that he imagines as a throne. Don't look too closely at the legs: One leg for the government haters, one for the Hillary haters, a leg of bigots, and a last leg of overt racists. Yeah, a few Trumpists are smart enough to try to talk nice, but scratch a Trump supporter and you find a hater.
My problem with all of this is that I'm a believer in enlightened self-interest (per Heinlein, even). If people see sufficiently large pictures, then they will see how their private and national selfishness has to be limited for the long-term survival of the human species.
Why don't they see the large pictures? I think it's mostly because the existing economic models, including slashdot's pitiful economic models, drive them to short-term BS journalism and reality TV. Brexit and Trumpism are just natural outcomes. Gawd save us all, but he won't. (Even if he existed, it would be a breach of his divinely insane plan.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
When you get an highly politicized media forcing a side and pushing and shaming people for not taking it, you may end alienating a large portion of the population and making em disobey you, even when you're pushing for the right decision.
And i bet at least in part, people just voted to leave because the creepy manipulative forceful thing they can't truly trust told em to vote to stay.
If they do it before the UK leaves, then maybe we can just have England leave both the EU and the UK at the same time. Looking at the voting map, all of the places with weak economies (including, amusingly, all of the ones that are heavily dependent on EU farm subsidies) want to leave. Maybe we should just kick them out of the UK and let them spend a few years learning what being alone in a global economy is really like.
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Because let us be clear, the biggest problem for the common man in the UK was not the EU but their own government having caused a for a European nation unusual rift between the haves and have nots.
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The Queen is the longest serving UK monarch in history, and has yet to interfere in Government decisions. I'm not sure that's really a barrier to democracy.
The House of Lords is indeed appointed and not elected. I really hate the idea of hereditary peers, and detest the political cronyism reflected in its appointees. However: Because it's not elected, the House is able to voice the non-populist views, draw the minority perspectives into legislation and prevent a tyranny of the majority.
This strengthens and is a crucial element of UK democracy and I would be distraught if we lost this purely because some people want an elected House. I do support reform, but nobody's offered a superior option.
Because leaving the EU is primarily about racism, not bureaucracy.
Get your fucking head out of the fucking sand and fucking listen to the people of the UK and why the voted to ditch the fucking EU.
None of the campaigning was done on racist grounds. None of the campaigners said "I hate the "
Most people voting Leave go on holiday in the EU, they want trade with the EU, they don't give a shit what colour someone is.
This has fuck all to do with racism. This has everything to do with sovereignty, self-determination, control over the laws and policies of the UK and a love of Great Britain.
That's not racist. That's pride. Backing all of that ahead of travel convenience, economic certainty, stability; that's integrity. You might want to give that a go.
Alex Salmond has already called for a second Scottish independence referendum and I don't see how that can be refuse, the same for NI. I'm pro-union and pro-eu and certainly see Scotland leaving the UK now.
It's sad that an American outside the EU is far more informed than 95% of British voters. Ignorance has ruined us.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Once again, the Baby Boomers fucked us. No houses, financial meltdowns, an economy built on debt and an "I'm all right Jack" attitude, and now out of the EU too. It makes me wonder how much more damage they can do before they die off.
Of course they are probably quite well insulated from this, having little if any mortgage to pay off and plenty of assets to cover the damage to their pensions. Of course they expect the taxpayer to pick up the bill for those pensions if things get really bad, due to a massive sense of entitlement.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
To give you an idea, my vote has never counted in a UK election, despite always participating. My chosen candidate never wins locally, so I have zero influence over who governs the country. That's how our unfair system works, if your local candidate doesn't win your vote is discarded and ignored.
It's not just a different kind of democracy, it's fundamentally unfair. Whenever anyone sets up a new democracy they base it on proportional representation, not the first-past-the-post system.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Germany also benefits massively from cheap European workers. And also benefitted massively from loans it made to Southern Europe to buy back its own products. Somehow the media have managed to make it look like the uk has an open door policy but hate all immigrants. Far from the truth on both counts. However the large companies and beuracracies have been in cahoots setting up a large trading block to benefit themselves. Even people in Poland Are coming to realise that they no longer own their own infrastructure any more since it has been privatised and bought out by international companies, but since it is called investment, no one notices. They benefit from international jobs but at what cost? I'm glad we are out since the Nhs was under threat from European threats including Ttipp however it now means we have to make sure the right wing in the uk don't stuff it up on their own. We have less people to blame. Being in control means our level of responsibility has increased.
And don't forget that the EU will have to give them a pretty louse "exit package", or risk making exiting the EU "appealing" to others. So, the "negotiations" won't go smoothly, and the UK will probably end up with worse deals than other non-EU countries - even if the EU itself might be losing on them.
Another interesting thing is to note that young people overwhelmingly voted "remain" (it was about 75-25 in the 18-24 category), when the most "leave" votes were in the 65+ category (60-40). So the UK will leave due to the votes of people who won't be part of the non-EU future (for long at least)...
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It's disgusting how a referendum of such significance- far more important than a general election- has been centered around and reported in terms of the internal, up-its-own-arse politicking of the Conservative (Tory) party. Disgusting, but not surprising.
As you say, the whole thing started out as a political sop, designed purely to placate its own right-wing "Eurosceptic" members.
I voted "Yes" in the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 for a number of reasons. A major one was that I knew the EU referendum was on the horizon and I wasn't prepared to risk Scotland being dragged out of the EU by Tories playing political football with the country's future simply to placate their own voter base in the south east of England.
Back then, I still thought it was far more likely than not that the UK would remain within the EU; I just wasn't prepared to risk it.
I look forward to the response of every politician that scaremongered about whether an independent Scotland's position would have the right to remain within the EU during the 2014 referendum. The same people who convinced Scotland to remain a part of the UK (#) and to accept the results of being in bed with an elephant that's barely aware of its existence most of the time. Whether that outcome was the Tory government majority across the UK as a whole in the 2015 general election rendering the SNP's overwhelming majority of MPs in Scotland irrelevant (the Tories got *one* isolated seat here). Or whether that was Scotland being dragged out of the EU against its will by a party and political process that has long been centered around the south-east of England.
I'm not suggesting that all these people- especially not the Labour supporters- wanted a Tory government or the UK out of the EU (Scotland against its will). I'm saying that they placed their own UK-centric interests first, knowing the risk to Scotland. Especially the Labour supporters.
I wonder how many of those people will have the nerve to show their faces now that the scaremongering outcome they claimed would happen if Scotland voted "Yes" to independence has come true thanks to their "No" side winning and the Tory-centric English vote dragging it out anyway.
(#) In particular, I'm thinking of the utterly worthless Labour party (until recently dominant in Scotland) that only got back into power in the 90s- admittedly very successfully- by selling out everything they stood for in order to appeal to Middle England, turning themselves into little more than red Tories. The same Labour party that may now have elected the stereotypically left-wing Jeremy Corbyn as leader (##) but don't stand a cat's chance in hell of getting elected by that same Middle England electorate and can be dismissed as irrelevant.
(##) Someone who at least appeared principled at first- even if I didn't agree with much of what he stood for- but was so utterly lukewarm, half-baked and borderline invisible in his support for "Remain" that one suspects this may have been intentional. (Corbyn was well-known for his Euroscepticism, but claimed to have switched to remain with some reservations. Please excuse my scepticism.)
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Now, lets see how UK will fare without the cheap EU workers,
The GB is free to invite as many cheap workers as they want or need, the only difference is that whey will no longer be *forced* to do so.
increased trade tax,
The trade taxes are governed by the European Economic Area, not the European Union. Whether GB stays out of EU but in EEA (like Norway and Switzerland for instance) remains to be seen.
visa to the EU and all the 'good things' non-EU countries have to cope with.
Visas to the "EU" are in fact governed by the Schengen Treaty which has nothing at all to do with the EU, and the standing of GB with respect to the Schengen Zone has not changed one iota because of the referendum.
You know, I wish that GB chose to stay, as my country is going to suffer for its leaving (as now there will be no counterweight at all to the Germany-France tandem, who will proceed to rape the rest of EU in name of their national interests until it completely falls apart). However, boy, I do have the grim satisfaction of someone having the courage to stand up and give the middle finger to crooks and liars like you and the eurocrats, who spew such blatant false propaganda. Attributing every good thing, from hens laying eggs to the sun rising, to the gracious benevolence of the EU.
But the EU is hardly the same kind of union that the USA are. Mostly in the mind of its subjects.
The USA consider themselves a nation. When 9/11 struck, Californians felt as attacked as anyone in New York did. Do you think a Portuguese would give a shit if someone blew half of Tallinn apart? THAT is the big difference.
The EU is an economy union, and only that. With nation states inside trying to rip as much out of the cake that this union is for their own national benefit as possible. With the Brits having been one of the worst offenders of this behavior.
And as long as this doesn't change I will not accept that spiel that "the EU is the biggest economy". Bullshit. The EU as a unified economy doesn't exist. It is a union for corporations trying to maximize their profits, there is not anything tangible in it for the people in the union or their economies beyond the interests of the corporations.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The inability for a British Prime Minister to decline to hand money over to people living in another country and the fact he had to ask
For fuck's sake, why the ever living fuck are people so incredibly stupid? This is and always was a complete and utter lie.
Today literally proved that we could unilaterally decline to "hand over" the money. Today literally proved that we always did have soverignty. If we didn't then the vote would never have happened.
The only thing we were never able to do is get other people to do exactly what we wanted. Big surprise, eh? Apparently however a bunch of raging idiots decided to fuck up the country in order to learn a very simple point. And they're going to learn it doubly so when we try and fail to negotiate a trade deal which is better than what we had already.
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