More than 60% of Brits want to re-join the EU with nearly the same number saying Britain was wrong to leave in the first place, a new poll shows.
More than 60% of Brits want to re-join the EU with nearly the same number saying Britain was wrong to leave in the first place, a new poll shows.
Yeah no bro, that door is closed.
You guys were invited to the party, then didn’t want to come. After the party was banging you decided to show up anyways, but made a lot of demands about it. We were trying to throw you a bone so sure, come on in. After whining and bitching all the time you threatened to leave for a while and we were like fine, there’s the door, get the fuck out if you want. You left and after you got home you were lonely and started crying in the corner. Now you’re asking to get back in? Fuck no, you made your bed, now sleep in it.
Hey hey hey, calm down. Not everyone asked for it. We have to deal with it too. I never wanted to leave so seeing so.ethi g like this makes me kinda happy and if we can get back in that be great so I can go back to some sort of normalcy. What’s the deal with the aggressive stance of what has happened must stay that way?
You have to understand that people like OP and Brexitiers are essentially one in the same. Like rabid football fans whose team must crush your team at all costs. They’re kids in their mentality and kids they will stay. To the detriment of everyone else. What seems to work with them is who can spout the most vitriolic nonsense. Just look at what her original post as an example.
Fuck these people.
I have just browsed their profile and its a torrent of oversimplified theories and an absolute Unquenched hatred for the “left” with shit like “Free Mental health care is a leftists idea” well yeah, when the right treat mental health, they just shoot them for being “Untermensch” I’m gonna go out on a limb here and assume this person has never had to deal with being poor or having a family member stricken with a disability or somone close that killed themselves.
Their outlook seems pretty obtuse. If you look closer at it you will notice the classic “I was just joking” line come up when they are confronted. Pathetic human that, just by existing causes human society to slip back into destitution, not on purpose but, by their sheer stupidity.
Yeah that’s not how the EU works and also a very simplistic way of looking at the world and global politics. In the UK 48% of people voted to remain so to lump an entire country together simplistically is naive. In the UK general election the Tories got 43.6% of the vote but because of our flawed democracy the tories got absolute power and that allowed them to pursue their aggressive and bombastic version of Brexit.
In any democracy people can change their minds and should be encouraged to do so, not aggressively condemend forever. The UK would likely be welcome to rejoin the EU; poltically it would strengthen the EU to show that leaving is negative and rejoining remains beneficial. It was also strengthen the argument that the EU needs to integrate further as a block because the hostile competing world of blocks such as the US, China, Russia and in the future India we’ll be better together. But the UK would have to rejoin without all the opt-outs etc established over the original membership.
However the poll is of limited value; there really is not a clamouring to rejoin the EU at present. It’s also not likely to be a simple thing to convince people to rejoin - the threshold for leaving was in many ways lower than the threshole for rejoining. Rejoining the EU now would mean no opt out for the Euro (which remains unpopular in the UK), and financially supporting the Common Agricultural Programme which is a mess. It also has to be said, leaving the EU has not been as bad as had been painted and negative elements have been obscured by the Covid pandemic in people’s minds.
The UK leaving the EU has been grossly simplified into a “good vs evil” narrative, in large part because of the idiocy and behaviour of the UK Government and Boris Johnson - the UK’s Donald Trump. The reasons for the UK leaving have been simplified into “ignorance and stupidity” so the many of the other reasons have been ignored and the EU has done nothing to address genuine flaws.
For example the conflicts between freedom of movement and the effects on jobs markets for low skilled segments of the population - that drove a lot of people in less prosperous “leave” areas to vote for leaving. Those people have been exploited by Leave campaigners, and the problem is certainly not entirely related to the EU (it is also part of the globalisation debate as well as major failures in UK government in evening economic growt). But the EU still has issues to address about the conflict between the benefits of freedom of movement overall versus the poorer economic areas in all countries that do not seem to be benefiting. That has all been obscured by the noise and simplification of the narrative over Brexit. Also there are many other major problems: the broken and distorted CAP, the flaws in the Eurozone which were exposed in the 2011 financial crisis, the failure of the EU to manage it’s outer borders together and the democractic deficit at the heart of the EU. Also just look at the inability of the EU to deal with authoritarian regimes such as Hungary and increasingly Poland.
It’s an easy and lazy narrative to dismiss the UK leaving the EU as “madness”, “stupidity” and “you made you bed, now lie in it”. There are certainly elements of that, but it obscures a truely hugely complex and more nuanced picture and that harms both the EU and the UK. I wanted to remain, and it’s nice to see polls switching from being 50:50 to more pro-EU but that does not mean a referendum in favour of rejoining the EU would succeed. The political will is just no there yet and the
If the UK voted to rejoin and the EU accepted that, there is no chance that they would get all the same demands like last time. Like no Schengen and no euro.
Very true, it is a very complex subject. My original post was mostly a joke, but also the current view of a lot of people in the EU right now. You can’t just leave and then say takebackskies, no matter how unfair and fucked up the situation was that got the UK to this point. I’m sure if the UK would really put an effort into rejoining, the EU would allow it, but not without a lot of concessions and some kind of trust that the UK will be in it for the long haul.
I don’t really know a lot about the culture in the UK, but it seems like a lot of people just stood back and did nothing. From what I understand a lot of older folk in the countryside voted to leave and a lot of the younger folk in the cities voted to remain. Of course it isn’t so cut and dry, misinformation was a big part of it (both intentional and non intentional) . But the part I don’t understand is why the young folk let this happen. They are a huge part of the economy, of what makes the country run and everybody seemed like welp this is the elected government so I guess it’s fine? Why weren’t there massive strikes and protests? Why wasn’t London completely shut down if such a large part of the people there felt like what was happening was not what they wanted. It wasn’t like this was a quick thing either, this went on for years, with the EU saying multiple times the UK didn’t have to leave and could just remain if they wanted.
I’m sure there’s a good explanation, but I can’t understand it.
There were dozens of enormous anti-Brexit protests in London and in cities across the country over the course of several years.
Because the party that was in government had been taken over by fringe Brexit extremists and didn’t care what the British voters wanted. Even then, they struggled to get enough of their own MPs to support them which is why it took many dozens of chaotic votes over several years - plus an illegal suspension of Parliament that the courts had to step in to overrule - before they were able to ram their deal through.
Even at the 2019 general election, a clear majority of voters voted for parties that were committed to a second referendum to allow us to stop Brexit, but the Tories ignored the voters and went ahead anyway.
You seem really uninformed about the nature of the Brexit debate in the UK between 2016 and the UK’s exit in 2020.
I only know the EU side and over here we were all like WTF are you guys doing? It is so insane, we cannot ever understand it. Friends of mine in the UK got their grants revoked, because they were coming from the EU. They were promised the grants would be paid by the UK instead, which was not only too late, but it never happened.
Also I was imagining more like French style protest, burning the whole damn thing down. Plus hurting the bastards where it counts, in their wallets, so for example massive strikes. But maybe that isn’t the British way. I haven’t heard in the news at the time something like “The third week of Brexit protests leave London in lockdown.”
So, fundamentally we’re a democracy. Particularly for the liberal educated middle-class people who accounted for much of the Remain vote, it’s an important tenet of faith that political ends are things that should be achieved at the ballot box, not on the street.
Here’s one narrative on what the culture in the UK is like: since the 1980s the UK has been run a bit like a city state with three inconvenient countries and one really inconvenient province welded onto it, it’s a very centralised system both politically and economically with London and the financial services industry dominating. After the transition to a service economy we literally left a lot of the country to ‘managed decline’ which is a euphemism for leaving a place to rot and saying ‘if you don’t like it leave and get a job in London’. Nobody’s saying coal mining for example didn’t have to end, but these single industry communities were left with nothing in the way of support or retraining at a time the state was being ideologically shrunk as much as possible due to the perceived failures of the post war political norms.
Under Blair some of this started to improve but then 2008 happened and everything went to shit and never really got better in much of the UK outside it’s more prosperous areas. Blairism died mostly because of the 2008 crash and the disaster that was the Iraq War which Blair strongly advocated, after that the Conservatives focused on an austere policy platform with an internal faction increasingly blaming the EU for the fact things weren’t improving as it was a convenient consequence-free scapegoat. The most controversial point of contention was the high numbers of EU migrant workers who were seen as driving down wages which among other fears was capitalised on by the populist party UKIP. Because of our insane FPTP electoral system UKIP had three seats at its peak but was legitimately threatening to collapse the ruling conservatives vote at the 2015 election as a spoiler and having just won the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 David Cameron decided to take another gamble and offer an in-out EU referendum to see off the UKIP threat to his party for good. He did not win this gamble.
I don’t need to tell anyone what happened next, a very effective campaign featuring a lot of psychological targeting through social media was run, lots of people in left-behind areas were presented an opportunity to stick it to the government by taking away something they supported, and we left the EU by the slimmest of margins. Brexit was an internal political crisis that got out of hand, largely because Cameron wasn’t as clever as he thought he was. If you don’t believe me go and look at the data, the most Brexity areas were typically the most deprived and this is no coincidence. Also our age pyramid is pretty fucked (the housing crisis is making this worse), the young people did protest and did oppose it, Parliament tied itself in knots due to the amount of opposition. At the end of the day though the older demographic was always going to swing it strongly.
The reason our politics has been so mad since Brexit is that the Brexiteers in Parliament were never meant to catch the car they were chasing and have no idea what to do now they’ve won. I doubt we’ll ever willingly join the Eurozone (the memories of Black Wednesday run deep enough joining the ERM in preparation would be deeply unpopular plus the symbolic loss of the unique coins) but other than that Brexit is dying as a relevant political force.
TL;DR Brexit was an internal Tory (Conservative) problem that got way, way out of hand and exploited by grifters like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. Also everyone go and read Orwell’s England your England, it’s a bit out of date obviously but a lot still rings true.
i think you’re mostly right. our country did not commit properly to the EU project. we were constantly looking for opt-outs and excuses.
in the UK’s defense for not joining at the start, we were vetoed twice by Charles De Gaulle. i wonder what the timeline would have looked like, had this not happened. 🙁
i dont think the UK should be let back in to the EU any time soon, but would you consider a longer term, distant future where the UK, or more likely it’s component countries, are admitted back into the EU? certainly on terms that require full integration, with absolutely no opt-outs? what is your take on that?
i ask because i’m looking to escape to the EU myself at some point, but it would be disheartening to see if people there don’t like us solely because of our government being stupid enough to hold a referendum for a political gamble.
Turns out you can’t have a discussion about the EU on a UK-based Lemmy community without someone randomly popping up who can’t comprehend that the UK isn’t a hive-mind and also seems to think they speak for the EU.
Happens every single time.
Who is the ‘you’ you keep referring to in this scenario? It’s certainly not me, or my friends, or my family, or the people I work with.
It’s not a majority of the voters in the wider UK anyway - the age breakdown of the referendum result and some basic demographic maths tells us that, of the people who cast a vote on that particular day in June 2016 who are still alive today, a majority voted Remain - and that’s before your even add in the huge numbers of people who have turned 18 since 2016 who skew heavily Remain/Rejoin too.
So really I ask - what the fuck are you talking about?
Imagine not seeing the manipulation that lead to the (minority of the actual voting population) leave vote, and thinking your own government isn’t doing the same shit to you on whatever relevant topic.
That’s a lot of anger to carry for the wrong bunch of people, but hey, you do you…
This is like as dumb as leaving was. You want to deny the bloc one of the largest economies on Earth, a financial center of the world? Over hurt feelings?
Hurt feelings has nothing to do with it.
It’s about not willing to join the first time round, complaining and bitching all the time, getting exception after exception and then pulling out. The EU is a TEAM, we’re all in this together. And when times are hard we need to stick together and help each other out. Every country has his strengths and weaknesses, hard times and good times. If we can’t count on your ass when there isn’t even a crisis going on, how can we count on you if the shit actually hits the fan?
The UK exceptionalism also needs to go right out of the window, sure you’ve got a big economy, but so do many of the larger EU countries. You ain’t nothing special and that’s fine. When we all stick together we form something real special and you choose to walk away from that.
I think it’s this kind of childish language with absolutely no nuance and a myopic understanding of history that puts people off the EU project.
You’re as worse as the Brexitiers with how you choose to talk to other people. It’s your way or fuck off. Both you cunts should quite honestly stay away from politics and at the very least tone down your rhetoric.
Boooo, second chance! Second chance!