Slashdot Mirror
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.
Germany "raped" Greece? How so? The Greeks very predictably couldn't run their own country - or rather, they ran it into the ground. What was the rest of the EU supposed to do? Just give them money endlessly with no consequences or responsibility to change their ways?
In the EU when people say "free movement" what they actually mean is "cheap labour". That's great for multinationals and very large national businesses, but horrible for anyone trying to pay the mortgage/rent, maintain the family and so on.
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!
No, it wasn't. It was restructured for a longer payoff and is still unsustainable. During the last year's standoff, the Troika dangled a carrot of 20% write-off - it failed to materialize, even though Greece imposed austerity on the level that has not been seen in a peacetime in Europe.
For the uninformed, the UK is undemocratic. We have a broken "first past the post" electoral system rather than some kind of proportional representation, which means that the government of the day is only voted for by a small minority but gets all the power. We also have a legion of unelected "peers" in the House of Lords, many of whom inherited their title or are there because they are religious leaders. It's a job for life and we don't get any say on who is appointed.
The EU on the other hand has a directly elected parliament, and governments appoint the members of the Commission for a few years at a time. It's much more democratic than the UK and we are diminished without it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah if only the UK had a manufacturing based economy instead of a consumer based one.
And now get fucked royally by them, because they arent a 350 mil. consumer block anymore.
Congrats to that
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.
Why is Snark Required?
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.
Even we uncouth Americans recognize the UK for what it is—a country that liked to be in the EU whenever it suited them, to the extent that they wanted to be, but also pretended that none of the rules applied to them. They've basically been an EU nation in name only for as long as I can remember. Frankly, I'm disappointed that the EU didn't throw them out years ago.
And as everyone predicted, the pound is tanking without the strength of the EU to prop it up. If the EU really wanted to have fun, they could probably make the UK economy collapse completely by refusing to trade with them. The impact on the rest of the EU would be small compared with the impact on the UK. Then in five years, they could offer to reluctantly let the UK back in with an exchange rate of two pounds to the Euro, but only if they actually started acting like real members of the EU. Some of the EU member nations might well decide to do that just out of spite.
Frankly, I'm surprised the pound is still worth as much as it is, given how tenuous their economic outlook is without the backing of the EU. I suspect that things will get a lot worse for the UK before they stabilize. The good news is that the U.K. can expect plenty of us yanks coming as tourists next summer when a pound is only worth 75 cents. Cheers.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
As it were, it wasn't Third Worlders which caused the UKIP to rise, it was First Worlders, mainly from Poland, which were taking the low paying jobs. And they were paying their taxes and their social insurance, and they were contributing an estimated 5 percent of GDP in the UK. For some reason, doing good work no one else is applying for is frowned upon in the UK.
I thought that wasn't true, post-Treaty of Lisbon? I'm an American so I could be uninformed on the issue. This is my impression:
Voters directly elect their Members of European Parliament. And I assume they directly elect their heads of state, which make up the European Council members.
The Council, those elected heads of state, nominate the Commission President, who then has to be approved by the directly elected MEPs.
The Council nominates Commissioners, with the agreement of the President. Then the Parliament, through directly elected MEPs, has to approve them. Basically to me Commissioners are like U.S. Executive branch Cabinet members.
Commissioners propose legislation to the Parliament but the Parliament has full power to pass, modify, and/or deny legislation.
The only thing I've seen that looked shady was that Commissioner-proposed legislation can maybe pass on Parliament inaction.
And maybe some cases where the elected heads of state can bypass Parliament and approve Commission proposals but I think the European Court of Justice has cracked down on both of those?
Mostly it seems very much in keeping with democratic republic ideals. At least as much as the U.K. parliament.
I don't get why people focus on the Commissioners when it really seems like the power struggle has been between the Council and Parliament, with the Lisbon Treat increasing Parliament's power and thus decreasing the Council's.
Ben Riley-Smith @benrileysmith
HOW AGES VOTED
(YouGov poll)
18-24: 75% Remain
25-49: 56% Remain
50-64: 44% Remain
65+: 39% Remain#EUref
6:24 PM - 23 Jun 2016
If they would have waited some years it would been a remain.
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
However the Council of Permanent Representatives (COREPER): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... prepares and 'adjusts' the agenda for the European Council, they are unelected.
The parliament pretty much rubber stamps. The one nuclear power they have is to sack the Commission, last time they chickened out though. Junckers himself is Luxembourger, Luxembourg is a major tax haven (yes, that's ad hominem, but it's an 'indicator').
I worked for both for nearly ten years and came out a marginal 'leaver'. That said, there's going to be some long term chaos now, that I'd prefer to avoid.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Unlike most European countries, Norway is rich in natural resources (oil and gas). Switzerland is the "secret" stash of European criminals (all collar colours). In a way the UK was justified to compare itself to these countries as long as it was in the EU, but the influence and value of "the City" depends on the EU membership, so the UK will not only find itself without equal access to the common market, and the many concessions it negotiated with the EU wiped out, but also one of the big reasons for its influence on Europe fleeing the country. I understand that people in favor of Brexit are ecstatic now, but they too will learn to understand what damage they've done first and foremost to their own interests.
I wanted to check on the progress of the Brexit vote, so I went to the CNN website, but it only said in large black letters "LEAVE".
Jeez, they didn't have to be so mean about it.
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.
Great, I'm really looking forward to competing with China on standards and wages.
The EU is going to punish us hard now. There are already rumblings from the far right about referendums, and they will want to stamp down on those hard. The Pound and markets are crashing. It's already too late, and those non-EU countries we want to do deals with are now going to pray on our weakness and desperation to do some kind of deal, any kind of deal as soon as possible.
Oh, and we will probably have Boris in charge, so double, sorry triple fucked.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't understand this. GB is already part of one of the biggest free trade blocks and they decided to withdraw. And, now you want them to go to negotiate yet more free trade agreements with distant countries, with their diminished negotiating power? That's a very bizarre way of reasoning.
But Germany did screw up Greece by imposing more and more austerity measures just when the country needed a boost from fiscal spending.
Problem is it needed responsible fiscal spending, not just spending. Greece is great at spending, but the vast majority of it is completely irresponsible. Providing more money would just have lead to more of the same. The only options were to bring in regulators to tell the Greeks how to spend (which wouldn't have gone down at all well) or to cut off the credit (which didn't go so well either). It's not something that can be fixed by any external agency, you'd need to reform the Greek way of doing business.
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.
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 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.)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
There is more thorough analysis available, which basicly states, that the groups Remain and Leave have very distinct properties.
Remainers are younger than 45, live in large towns and have an university degree or are students at an university.
Leavers are older than 45, live in rural and small town regions, mainly in the East and North of England and in Central Wales, and have no university degree.
I found these comments really interesting because you're basically saying that the UK has now become just like the USA. We have the same issues here. People in small towns with no higher education have completely different values and desires from the educated people who live in cities. I can't speak to UK politics, but some of this in the US is the fault of the Republican Party, who in the past decade started embracing anti-intellectuals as a valued voting bloc. In fact, I'd point out that Sarah Palin has made her career out of promoting anti-intellectualism as the solution to all of America's problems. Sorry to hear you're now one of us, UK people.
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.
Build a wall, and make the Romans pay for it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."