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In the Aftermath Of Brexit, Brits Google About Irish Passport, Meaning Of EU, and Why it All Happened
As the world makes peace with the news that the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, people in the UK are increasingly trying to figure out what this means. Google noted on Twitter late Thursday that "What is the EU?" was the second top UK question on the EU since the news broke, with "Why did Britain leave the EU?" being the first. The questions also speak volume about the awareness of the issue among them. Understandably, some people also resorted to the search engine to look for Irish passports. "Getting an Irish passport" keywords saw a 100% surge.
Since Britain left Europe... does that mean it's a continent now?
Scotland seems to want to stay in the EU:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling...
Will the Kingdoms become Ununited, as Jasper Fforde shows:
http://www.jasperfforde.com/dr...
Maybe those in power really do know what they're doing.
In this case, I don't think they did. Cameron gambled that he could appease his Eurosceptic Tories with this referendum, not really believing that it would ever pass. It was a major miscalculation.
rule-making body a thousand miles away ... look on a Map? Bruessels and Strassbourg are not thousands of miles away from London.
Cough cough
same about the World Trade Organization. Why are THEY making decisions for Americans?
Erm? Because they are basically run by American Mega Corporations and their cronies?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Except Switzerland and Norway are in the EEA for trade advantages, are subject to all the freedom of movement rules and other policies of the EU absorbed into it (5000+), pay significant fees to Brussels anyway, and simply have no representation. EU membership is better.
Negotiations have already started. Not Article 50 negotiations, of course. Only the UK can invoke those. But as far as the 27 EU member states are concerned, the UK is overstaying its welcome from today onwards. They UK can legally stay as long as it wants, but politically it will be treated like a stranger.
It is already clear that if the UK wants continued access to the single market, it will basically have to accept all the things that voters hoped to get rid off with their "leave" vote, and get no say in the future decisions of the EU. Pay dues to the EU? Check. Grant foreigners freedom of movement? Check. Follow EU rules on marketability of products? Check. Get to vote on any of those rules? Nope. Some people are still delusional about this. They think the UK will get special treatment because at the moment it imports more from the EU than it exports to the EU, implying that the EU needs the UK market more than the UK needs the EU market. But that's a flawed argument. Almost half the exports of the UK are sold on the European market, but only 14% of the EU exports are sold in the UK.
Aside from all the nonsense this election cycle, the sentiment in the world is the same among working-class people in the west - that the political elites have abandoned them. They are angry about immigration depressing wages, and they are angry about globalism wiping out jobs altogether.
These two things have been ignored by politicians for so long now, that people angry enough to elect idiots like Johnson and Trump in order to effect change.
They've made their own bed.
From TFA:
"What is the EU?" and "What happens if we leave the EU?" The former was the second top UK question on the EU after the results were officially announced.
Seriously, shouldn't they have been asking this before they voted?
I feel the same about the World Trade Organization. Why are THEY making decisions for Americans?
The WTO is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This was an attempt to set international institutions in place to regulate international trade in order to make it easier to get trade moving. It was an attempt to provide an international framework in which countries could sort out their differences on trade matters peacefully without resorting to trade wars, protectionism, and to prevent a repeat of the same economic conditions that ultimately led to two world wars.
Does that answer your question?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Are you in the UK? Do you know what happens here? Do you know what the damnable muslims have done? They rape our women, they demand concessions like zero pork products in schools, which also means English children are forbidden to bring their own lunch with pork. No one is allowed to speak up against islam, but those days ended yesterday. A nice, healthy nationalism will emerge, where the English are in charge of their own destiny. No more taking in the sodden camel jockeys, who have paid nothing into the system, but live off the dole, take housing meant for the English, did I mention rape our women. buy old monument chapels and churches and use them for the Godforsaken worship of their false god, allah and his child-raping prophet, mohammed. Fuck them. This is England -- a white, northern European country that deserves to set her own agenda, not one of globalism from Belgium. Look at the EU. Immigration has destroyed the EU in the last couple of years. It's unsafe to walk so many cities now. muslim men demand no beer be sold within their sight, even though this is Europe, not Turdistan. Fuck the muslims. They have done more to ruin England and Europe in just a few years. Call me a bigot. This is England! You want to come here? Assimilate. Speak English, keep your head down, cause zero trouble, leave our women alone. This is England.
Swap out Jews for Muslims and you've got a rant there that Hitler would have been proud of. Only took 70 years, but of course most of the people alive when this kind of fascist nationalism grew into power in the 30s are dead now anyway, so no one really remembers anymore.
Actually, this is great information for America. We get to observe what happens when a stable western country with a large economy makes a drastic change driven mainly by xenophobia. Maybe the British economy crashes, maybe its all roses. All we have to do is watch...
(many probably won't watch)
Definitely not entirely anecdotal. There was a fair bit of buyer's remorse around our (mostly pro-remain) offices in Manchester today, with only a handful prepared to stand by their "Leave" vote, even before management confirmed that one entire engineering department - about 600 employees, or 10% of our UK workforce - was going to be wound up because EU regulations require that the work be done by staff located within an EU member state, and the bulk of their work was coming from the EU. As you can imagine, the atmosphere in the office went downhill pretty sharpish after that...
As for the do-over, despite the campaign on the UK Government's equivalent to change.org getting a huge number of votes asking for just this, the answer is "none". The guy at work (a Leave voter with buyer's remorse, as it happens) who brought this to our attention seemed to think it was asking the government to enact some provision of the official rules of the referedum concerning turnout levels and margins of victory. Turns out that was about on a par with the level of research many of the Leave voters with buyer's remorse presumably did; "none at all". A quick search with Google, a download of the actual legislation for the referendum from Parliament's website, a bit of reading (it's not a huge document) and it's pretty easy to see that this is a one-shot deal, in or out, and there is no such turnout/margin of victory clause. In fact the word "turnout" appears exactly twice, and one of those is to define the meaning of the word "turnout".
It's done. We're out, and we're now going to have to live with the consequences of that vote. From the state of the global markets and so on it also looks like quite a few people who are not UK citizens and didn't get a say in the matter are, at least to some extent, coming along for the ride. Sorry about that.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The creation a low-paying, 16-hours/day, 7-days/week job in Vietnam doesn't mean jack shit to somebody who used to have a moderately well-paying, 8-hours/day, 5-days/week job working at a factory in the UK or the US. There wasn't a net win globally; the third-worlder isn't all that much better off than before, and may actually be much worse off if they went from an agricultural job they had some control over their destiny to a dismal factory job where they have no control at all. Meanwhile, the first-worlders are much worse off, being unemployed and often unable to find employment due to widespread economic destruction affecting entire regions and even countries. The only ones benefiting are a very small ownership class reaping all of the benefits, who thanks to their political connections and ability to bypass taxation systems have tended to avoid contributing back much to society at large. Then there's the spin-off effect from the destruction of middle class jobs. Eliminating one middle-class job may make one ownership-class individual wealthier, but it also makes numerous other middle-class individuals much worse off economically now that they've lost much of the business of the other middle-class employee who lost his job.
People in the UK and the US are now voting based on their own personal experiences with globalization, with immigration, and with free trade. These experiences have been devastating. It's no wonder they've had enough, and are doing what they can to get some major changes going on.
Turnout was almost 73% of eligible voters. That's a very large number.
That means 27% of people of voting age didn't bother to vote, and I'm quite willing to bet that this non-voting group was skewed towards the younger end of the spectrum. (#)
Thus, it's probably fair to say that if enough of those non-voters *had* actually bothered to vote, the result would have gone moderately but clearly the other way.
As it stands, this is all academic now. But let's bear these people in mind- those who had a reasonable opportunity to vote, but didn't bother- because they have no right- not now, not in ten, twenty, forty years time, not ever- to complain about the consequences of this decision or anything remotely related to it.
You didn't vote? Then you voted Leave. End of story. STFU.
(#) This is almost always true, but it's quite clear in this case that older voters were not only more anti-EU and likely to support Leave, but also more actively cared about it than younger voters' tendency to be more pro-EU but generally passive. An illustration of how those older voters skewed the debate was the endless stream of newspaper letters, commenters on Radio 4 et al explaining that "I voted for a common *market* in 1975, blah blah blah". To put this into perspective, anyone old enough to have had a vote in 1975 would have to be almost sixty at the very least today. Yes, those people making the most noise about Europe are those already approaching- if not well into- retirement age, with their careers behind them and a "Back to the 50s" post-war mentality. Yet the consequences of their choice will dictate the future of a 19-year-old student long after they die off in 15-30 years time.
Still, if that student couldn't be bothered to vote anyway, he can STFU too.
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